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Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

Titanic Banks Hit Libor ‘Berg

Author:     ELLEN BROWN
Source:     Asia Times (Hong Kong)
Publication Date:     24-Jul-12
 Link: Titanic Banks Hit Libor ‘Berg
Stephan:   This is an excellent assessment, I think, of the Libor trend. Detailed and well-researched, it presents this complex situation in clear language. It is not a simple story, except for this: It is entirely a demonstration of what happens when profit and not national wellness is the first priority. Because few were held to account the banking system, both nationally and internationally, continues to be profoundly dysfunctional. Lack of regulation, as this period has clearly shown, is not good for the world's financial structure. They may want no regulation, but it isn't good for them, and it leads to this, and all the rest of the last 30 years, since Reagan began dismantling regulation. We must break this cycle. Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, PublicBankingInstitute.org. In Web of Debt, her latest of 12 books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are webofdebt.com and ellenbrown.com.

At one time, calling the large multinational banks a ‘cartel’ branded you as a conspiracy theorist. Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts.

Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing. Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed. Conspiracy theory has become established fact.

In an article in the July 3 Guardian titled ‘Private Banks Have Failed – We Need a Public Solution’, Seumas Milne writes of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) rate-rigging scandal admitted to by Barclays Bank:

It’s already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays and indeed the City of London. This is one of multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with in-built incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance.

… It could of course have happened only in a private-dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free-market ideology that still holds sway in public […]

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