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Showing Original Post only (View all)Taibbi: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever (WOW!) [View all]
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix
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" 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.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.
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" 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.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.
A $379 TRILLION DOLLAR market.
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Taibbi: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever (WOW!) [View all]
antigop
Apr 2013
OP
Seems like if you had 500 trillion dollars, you could buy you way out of any trouble.
bloomington-lib
Apr 2013
#2
Well, that was an ignorant and dickish reply. Thanks for not actually reading my post.
arcane1
Apr 2013
#9
really...? And saying this is a beneficial thing even though it sucks for a majority
fascisthunter
Apr 2013
#17
Another reading comprehension failure. I was talking about understanding financial nomenclature.
arcane1
Apr 2013
#41
Who was it that said "We'll hire 1/2 of the population to enslave the other 1/2"??
99th_Monkey
Apr 2013
#47
I really thought that Taibbi's recent article alluded to something of this magnitude
antigop
Apr 2013
#7
This is the tool that is being put in place and the reason why congress will not create jobs.... We
midnight
Apr 2013
#60
A system of total corruption,. a rigged game, this is capitalism of today.
Civilization2
Apr 2013
#35
You're welcome. Did you see the movie "The Matrix"? That's what it feels like. nt
antigop
Apr 2013
#57