Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever | Common Dreams

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever | Common Dreams
"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."

Transcripts Show Corrupt Traders Planning To Rig Global Financial Markets: ‘It’s A Cartel Now In London’

Transcripts Show Corrupt Traders Planning To Rig Global Financial Markets: ‘It’s A Cartel Now In London’: The Royal Bank of Scotland will have to pay more than $600 million to U.S. and UK regulators for its role in rigging the LIBOR interest rate. RBS is one of several banks that rigged LIBOR in order to make huge profits, as regulators looked the other way. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission today released [...]/p

Continuing LIBOR Scandal Reveals The Farce Of ‘Light-Touch’ Regulation

Continuing LIBOR Scandal Reveals The Farce Of ‘Light-Touch’ Regulation: London became one of the globe’s primary financial hubs partly through its so-called “light touch” regulatory approach — effectively trusting some of the world’s largest and most powerful banking enterprises to manage their own affairs without much government intervention. As a result, the U.K. central bank alternately ignored the burgeoning business of LIBOR-rigging and actively [...]/p

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on the biggest Wall Street story of the year: Libor

LIBOR Rate-Fixing Scandal Sets Off Investigations, Lawsuits Against Big Banks

Cities around the country, from Baltimore to Oakland, are taking legal action against the banks responsible for suppressing the London interbank offered rate, Libor. And some 75% of major cities involved in libor-tied interest-rate swaps stand to reclaim taxpayer losses in addition to libor-backed mortgage holders who lost money on the rate's manipulation.

The Deep Back Story of Liborgate » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

The Deep Back Story of Liborgate » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
"In the last four years costly interest rate swaps have become a focus of community activists and public sector unions who have watched as literally hundreds of millions, perhaps billions have been drained from the public sector. Until recently activists trying to address this crisis have been pressuring elected officials and banks, using the logic that it was the Federal Reserve’s reduction of rates that caused most swaps to turn toxic. However, because Libor is the key rate with which the majority of interest rate swap payments are calculated today, the Libor scandal has reinvigorated and transformed the moral and legal arguments that can be used by local governments seeking exits from toxic swaps. Any manipulation of Libor rates since 2007 means that swap counterparty payments linked to hundreds of trillions in public debts have been distorted, potentially to the detriment of the public, all of this on top of the already unjust depression of rates caused by the Fed. Even the stolid Financial Times has made note of this, saying that local governments burned by swaps and seeking an exit “have a point,” and that “A groundswell of such resistance should worry other banks"."

Kucinich Explains the LIBOR Scandal

Kucinich Explains the LIBOR Scandal
"Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today released a video on YouTube explaining the “LIBOR scandal” and why it is important to everyone who participates in the economy. Kucinich explained in easily understandable language what the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is, how it affects world markets, and why the Barclay’s scandal is important."