Forum Post: LIBOR - The mind reels in disbelief under the greatest fraud in world history!!!
Posted 12 years ago on July 13, 2012, 7:30 p.m. EST by Underdog
(2971)
from Clermont, FL
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Why LIBOR Matters to You
By messing with the LIBOR benchmark rates that are tied to an estimated $800 trillion of securities, the offending banks essentially played with matches in the middle of the world's largest house of leveraged cards. The combined gross domestic product of all the nations of the world is only about $70 trillion, so the towering mountain of LIBOR-connected securities out there climbs into the realm of leveraged derivatives like those that nearly brought the global financial system to its knees at the height of the 2008 credit crisis. First by building that leveraged house of cards in the first place on a completely obscene scale, and then by shaking its very foundation by manipulating the interest rates on which all that paper is based, the rate-rigging banks took unthinkable risks with the fate of the entire global financial system.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/07/09/the-800-trillion-scandal-how-banks-libor-lies-affected-you/
Thanx 'Ud' for the excellent post and links. I appreciated 'bw' & your 'cris des coeurs', further to which, I append the following :
The 18 banks that constitute the committee to set 'LIBOR' are :
Bank of America
Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd
Barclays Bank plc
BNP Paribas
Citibank NA
Credit Agricole CIB
Credit Suisse
Deutsche Bank AG
HSBC
JP Morgan Chase
Lloyds Banking Group
Rabobank
Royal Bank of Canada
Société Générale
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation Europe Ltd (SMBCE)
The Norinchukin Bank
The Royal Bank of Scotland Group
UBS AG
Some other relevant links on the matter :
"How Big Banks Run the World - at Your Expense - Once you realize money must be and is regularly created and expanded, then the interesting questions begin to occur - like "How is it done ?" & "Who benefits from it ?" by Gar Alperowitz : http://truth-out.org/news/item/9658-how-big-banks-run-the-world-at-your-expense ,
"Why is Nobody Freaking Out About the LIBOR Banking Scandal ?", by Matt Taibbi : http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-is-nobody-freaking-out-about-the-libor-banking-scandal-20120703 ,
"Banking scandal : How document trail reveals global scam", by Jamie Doward : http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jun/30/banking-scandal-barclays-lawsuits-libor ,
"How Big Banks Victimize Our Democracy", by Bill Moyers - Moyers, Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government. Also, Peter Edelman on fighting U.S. poverty : http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31694.htm &
"Banks Weren’t Meant to Be Like This", by Prof. Michael Hudson ; http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30367.htm .
radix omnium malorum est cupiditas ...
Great post, Underdog. The more people who understand this the better.
This should reinvigorate OWS like nothing else, because this is MANY orders of magnitude larger than the 2008/2009 bank bailouts and insults that led to OWS. This might lead to OLS (Occupy LIBOR Scandal). If this doesn't lead to the breakup of the worldwide banking cartel and TBTF then nothing will. OWS should be watching the developments of this with rabid interest, because this is really, really, REALLY BIG!!!!
I definitely agree with you. Here's an interesting protest idea from jk1234:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/how-about-this-protest-idea-for-ows/
Here is how I feel about it from a comment on another post:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/why-ows-is-wrong/#comment-781853
Some more 'fire to your ire' - 'Ud' & thanx for your great link. Thus, to follow my links above :
e tenebris, lux ...
Wow, Underdog, you articulate that so well! Will Americans finally wake up?
I have my doubts, but if they don't we are done for. That is more plainly obvious to me now than it has ever been before. People have simply GOT to wake up to what is going on. A strategy is DESPERATELY needed to flood the MSM with this information and raise awareness to the tipping point. If the country stays asleep, they will wake up too late and will realize they had an opportunity to prevent their enslavement and that they let that opportunity slip by. Then there will be "wailing and gnashing of teeth" as they realize they put themselves into their own self-made Hell.
WTFUP!!!! (Wake The F**K Up People!!!!)
WTFUP! Yes! Perhaps good solid numbers showing exactly how much each American has been ripped off would help get them out of their slumber.
I am still working on getting the solid numbers, but in the meantime take a look at this:
There are really two different Libor scandals, and both are about to hit America's shores. The first has to do with a period just before the financial crisis, around 2007, when Barclays and, presumably, other major banks submitted fake Libor rates lower than the banks' actual borrowing costs in order to disguise how much trouble they were in. This was bad enough. Had American regulators known then, they might have taken action earlier to diminish the impact of the near financial meltdown of 2008.
But the other scandal is worse, and is likely to get the blood moving even among Americans who assume they've already seen all the damage Wall Street can do. It involves a more general practice – starting around 2005 and continuing until … who knows, it might still be going on – to rig the Libor in whatever way necessary to assure the banks' bets on derivatives would be profitable. This is insider trading on a gigantic scale. It makes the bankers winners and the rest of us – whose money they've used to make their bets – losers and chumps.
Obviously, Libor is not limited to the UK. As the benchmark for trillions of dollars of loans worldwide – mortgage loans, small-business loans, personal loans – it affects the most basic service banks provide: borrowing money and lending it out. People put their savings in a bank to hold in trust, and the bank agrees to pay interest on those. And people borrow money from the bank and agree to pay the bank interest.
The typical saver or borrower on both sides of the Atlantic trusts that the banking system is setting today's rate based on its best guess about the future worth of the money. And we assume that the banks' guess is based, in turn, on the cumulative market predictions of countless lenders and borrowers all over the world about the future supply and demand for money.
But if that assumption is wrong – if the bankers are manipulating the interest rate so they can place bets with the money we lend or repay them, bets that will pay off big for them because they have inside information on what the market is really predicting which they're not sharing with the rest of us – it's a different story altogether.
It would amount to a rip-off of almost cosmic proportions – trillions of dollars that average people would otherwise have received or saved on their lending and borrowing that have been going to the bankers instead.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/08/american-libor-banking-scandal-us?newsfeed=true
Seems maybe the Fed knew what was going on in 2007:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/13/new-york-fed-libor-documents_n_1671524.html
Good work, Underdog, keep us posted. Those numbers would be critical. I'll look around too.
In order to aid and abet your researches :
fiat lux ...
Nice! Thanks! :)
The Federal Reserve and its cronies at JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citibank never thought this mother of all scandals would ever see the light of day. Now the conspiracy of banksters has been exposed for all to see. The regulators will probably slap them on their wrists with pocket change penalties. The Justice Department will sit on its hands as usual.
After all, the indignity of hard jail time is reserved for plebeian Main Street Americans. Politicians from both parties are too busy soliciting campaign contributions from the banksters to notice the affront to millions of Americans who got ripped off. The Fed knew all along that the big banks were manipulating interest rates, but did nothing concrete to stop it. The Fed condoned the practice because it was in the Fed's best interest for it to happen. God forbid Americans should think that the financial system was falling apart at the seams. It's so much easier to just cover it up. Why spook everybody unnecessarily? What's a little fraud among friends? Americans wouldn't notice. The best scam a banker can pull off is to steal pennies from honest people in huge volume. It is hard to beat the Lie-More scandal for its reach and impact. And its balls. Watch the bankers roll on each other and the central bankers to ensure they receive no jail time and guess what? The banksters will triumph again at our expense.
God I hope you're wrong about this, but my gut tells me you're probably right.
After LIBOR, I am almost at the point...No, scratch that...I AM at the point of wanting a million-man vigilante army to storm the banks and drag them out on the streets and shoot them dead on the spot. This quiet, peaceful OWS protest approach is not getting the job done. They laugh at us and call us fools while they continue in their rape and pilage and plunder. They think they have nothing to fear from the people because they have bought and paid for the politicians and the laws. Dodd-Frank --- what a joke!!! More bullshit to appease the masses and fool them into thinking something of value is being done to correct their never-ending criminal behavior. They are PSYCHOPATHS and, therefore, CANNOT CHANGE...they are biologically hard-wired to engage in monsterous ripoffs like Lie-More.
Gotta clean house on ALL of the huge banking cartels. This INCLUDES the Fed. Abolish it. We don't need it. All it has done since 1913 is devalue our currency. Founded in collusion, it operates on the principles of debt. And 100 years after it's founding, look at our national debt situation.
I'm fed up with the Fed and these TBTF professional rip-off assholes who have screwed us over and thrown us under the bus while they laugh and drink their gut full of financial debauchery and pat themselves on the back for how smart they are at being professional white-collar criminals of LIBORious proportions. If a rabid animal threatens your life, you don't treat it kindly. You deal with it through execution.
Time to get them out NOW anyway possible -- peaceful or otherwise. Peaceful doesn't seem to be working that I can see. Maybe it is and I just don't see it. I normally don't advocate violence of any kind, but when things get bad enough, and the people you are dealing with are unconscionable psychopathic animals who don't care if they step all over you and push your face in the mud in utter arrogance and contempt, then I draw the line right there with peaceful protest. If all they understand is vulgarity in their actions, then I say let's give them something they can understand.