Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever (Taibbi - Rolling Stone)

[aggiesal]

By Matt Taibbi

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t&quot worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

. . .

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425

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WOW

[xchrom]

1. There doesn't need to be a big, smokey

Back room conspiracy.

Enough people with similar, sympathetic university backgrounds - get together at weddings, funerals, political get togethers - and voila - you have agreement.

Doesn't take dark and nefarious - just takes common interests.

[haele]

2. Just a wink and a nod, and there you go - quid pro quo without anything made official.

Those little signals - like the laconically raised eyebrow when talking about "workers" or "customers", the negligent shrug when talking about the weighing the risks on who might be hurt on that big deal you made that got you a lot of compensation... that grin when talking about "just think about how much revenue we can deliver to the shareholders!"
It's easy to rig the system so long as most big decision making is kept within an ever-shrinking circle of wealth and power.

Haele

[Marr]

17. In the case of the Libor scandal, it pretty much *was* a smokey backroom with a handful of

influential players agreeing to fix a number.

We need to start throwing these people in federal prison, and frankly, I think these crimes ought to warrant the death penalty. If anyone is going to get executed by the state, these global-scale criminals ought to be first in line.

[toddaa]

27. They own the prisons

The system works perfectly.

[BethanyQuartz]

26. The right wingers were right all along

Send your kid off to college and he or she will be brainwashed and corrupted. They just forgot to mention they were talking about rich kids and Ivy League schools.

[byeya]

3. But, but...The Magic of the Marketplace; the Invisible Hand; the Laffer Curve; bootstraps,

Yarbles...

[Fire Walk With Me]

4. KICK

[Waiting For Everyman]

5. Consider gas prices, food prices, mortgage costs, energy costs,

busted out municipalities from Detroit to Greece, the number of homes and pensions already stolen everywhere.

And that STILL doesn't even consider the biggest scam of all... credit scores. These same jerks are picking ALL the winners and losers. There is no "market" at all. It's a fiction, entirely, by now. A thing of the past, ompletely gone.

Of course neither I nor lots of us needed this article or these investigations to know this, but it's nice that the "credible" sources and authorities are beginning to catch on. Now it would be nice if they all did their jobs. (Ludicrous thought.)

So much has been stolen from so many, and it needs to stop now. This really needs a top-to-bottom overhaul, to come up with a real, functioning, and fair (meaning one with some ethics built in) financial structure, and then a global summit to coordinate. I would suggest winding it back about 40 years, and only updating for technology -- then we might have a decent starting point.

[socialist_n_TN]

8. There's only one way to stop it......

at this point anyway. The people just have to realize it.

[Teamster Jeff]

6. K&R

[Lady Freedom Returns]

7. K & R n/t

[Lady Freedom Returns]

13. Again. n/t

[Initech]

9. George Carlin was right: It's a big club and we're not in it.

[reformist2]

11. Ever since US gov't bailed out the banking system, all banker salaries should be regulated by *us*!

[Bonobo]

12. At some point, we should label those who do NOT believe in a global conspiracy

of the rich as the "Troofers".

[limpyhobbler]

14. du rec nt

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

15. Shouldn't this be in the Dungeon with all the other WHACKO CT woo?!

[ozone_man]

16. It's not CT.

It's reality.

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

18. Sure, and that's why it's all over the news, with our justice dept. prosecuting the perps

[Fire Walk With Me]

19. The government and DOJ do what these banksters say, not the inverse. n/t

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

20. So, now the whole Gov and Dept. of Justice is in on it, too? Our crack MSM would be all over it

http://web.archive.org/web/20010204234500/http://mediawhoresonline.com/

[Fire Walk With Me]

21. Gay escorts making repeated visits to the WH simply isn't news :D

[mick063]

22. These aren't hidden scams

They stick out like a sore thumb for everyone to see.

It isn't enough that the Robber Barons must steal your life savings. They must also demonstrate their unmitigated power by openly doing so. It's a psychopathic ego thing. The Attorney General has made it perfectly clear that he cannot stop them.


Robber Barons transparency trumps President Obama's transparency.

[Jasana]

23. I don't know why this surprises anybody.

[URL=.html][IMG][/IMG][/URL]

[Fire Walk With Me]

24. Kick

[woo me with science]

25. Corrupt to the core.

Had enough yet?

Yet?

[Benton D Struckcheon]

28. Just found this article and read it,

then figured there had to be a thread on it here.
I am quite literally speechless. My first programming job at a bank involved stuff having to do with LIBOR, so I know all about how that is used. Didn't know about ISDAfix though.
LIBOR was already a massive scandal; just about everything with a variable interest rate uses LIBOR for pricing, and it's also used for hedging currency exposures.
This ISDAfix thing on top of that is just extraordinary. Nuts. And no one is going to jail.