How Wall Street fraudsters ripped you off, again

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:07:00 +0000

Just as you’re struggling to finance a summer vacation, or simply to pay the freaking rent, how would you like to open your wallet and hand over a wad of cash to a gang of international con artists who commit fraud as casually as they order a five-course dinner?

Really? That’s how you feel about it? Well, tell it to the U.S. Department of Justice, because that’s just what’s going down as a result of the LIBOR scandal.

To recap: Bank hustlers manipulated the world’s most important set of benchmark interest rates and thereby impacted the prices of upward of $500 trillion worth of financial instruments. The LIBOR scam devastated state and municipal budgets, squeezed pension yields and ripped off bank shareholders. In a case of jaw-dropping fraud, greedy traders rigged up the benchmark so that they could cash in on bets on derivatives, while banks submitted fake numbers to make themselves look financially healthier. One Barclays official was fond of fudging numbers in exchange for champagne. “Dude…I owe you big time!” gushed a trader in an email to Barclays’ Mr. Fix-It. “Come over one day after work and I'm opening a bottle of Bollinger."

A crisis worse than 2008?

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 19:27:00 +0000

Seeing Barclays and other global banks rig interest rates on an estimated $800 trillion worth of municipal bonds, corporate loans, adjustable rate mortgages, car loans, credit card payments, credit default swaps and other derivatives should give us a clue: We can’t trust the jerks. But the rot goes far beyond the destruction of trust, as damaging as that is. According to legal findings by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the U.K.’s Financial Services Administration, the wrongdoing extended to nothing less than criminal conspiracies within Barclays and between it and its competitors, all on a global scale.

Salon.com > Libor

How Wall Street fraudsters ripped you off, again

A crisis worse than 2008?