Global bank interest rates scandal...LIBOR

The credibility of the system that underpins lending around the globe came under renewed assault Tuesday — and the consequences could find their way into Americans’ pocketbooks.

Libor, the London interbank offered rate, is a standard interest rate for loans between banks. It serves as a benchmark for more than $10 trillion in lending to businesses and consumers worldwide. In the United States, it is linked to the interest rates on student loans, credit cards and even some mortgages.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/barclays-executives-resign-in-interest-rate-scandal/2012/07/03/gJQATpDqLW_story.html

Here are some articles about the LIBOR interest rate scandal. Another example of bankers gone wild.

The 21st has been a banner century for financial and accounting scandals. Enron, the dotcom bust, the subprime-mortgage crisis and the bank bailouts have all contributed to the very low esteem in which the American public holds Corporate America in general, and high finance in particular. So it is no small feat that the latest interest-rate-fixing LIBOR scandal is being heralded as the most egregious in a generation or, as Robert Scheer put it in the Nation, “the crime of the century.”


LIBOR is an acronym for the London interbank offered rate, and it is the average interest rate the world’s largest banks pay when they borrow money. And this figure (or figures, as different LIBORs are calculated for different loan maturities and currencies) is used to price hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of financial instruments, from high-yield corporate debt to student loans.



Read more: http://business.time.com/2012/07/09/libor-scandal-the-crime-of-the-century/?iid=tsmodule#ixzz208awzPno

Check this out:

ROUBINI: Break Up the Banks or Hang Someone in the Streets

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=152786

What can we do to prevent banking scandals?

In a recent interview, Bloomberg's Caroline Connan asked Nouriel Roubini what he thought about the Barclays LIBOR rate-fixing scandal.

Rather than addressing it directly, Roubini argued that many of the structural issues that caused the financial crisis have not yet been addressed since the financial crisis.

"The incentives of the banks is still to cheat and do things that are either illegal or immoral," he said. "The only way to avoid that is to break up these financial supermarkets. When you have within the same firm commercial banking, investment banking, asset management, prime brokerage, insurance, underwriting , derivatives...there are no Chinese walls and there are massive conflicts of interest." Roubini thinks its wiser to address the system than the players.

"Bankers are greedy," he continued. "They've been greedy for the last hundreds of years. It's not a question of if they're more immoral today than they were a thousand years ago. You have to make sure they behave in ways in which they minimize those risks. One way of doing it is to separate those activities so you minimize the conflicts of interest. Otherwise these things are going to happen over and over again."...


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/roubini-break-up-banks-greedy-bankers-2012-7#ixzz209Thxyo2

Good link and here's the rest of his interview...

However, this is not to say people shouldn't be punished. Roubini thinks that everything should be done to create disincentives to prevent bankers from acting in bad ways. And currently, the punishments just don't go far enough.
"Nobody has gone to jail since the financial crisis. The banks, they do things that are illegal and at best they slap on them a fine. If some people end up in jail, maybe that will teach a lesson to somebody. Or somebody hanging in the streets."
That last bit caused Bloomberg's Connan to pause before she could get to the next question.
Speaking of the bigger picture, Roubini warned that the current risks out there could potentially trounce the global economy in 2013.
"A collapse of the eurozone, a U.S. double dip, a hard landing in China, a hard landing in emerging markets, and war in the middle east...next year we could see a global perfect storm," he warned.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/roubini-break-up-banks-greedy-bankers-2012-7#ixzz209jsAdR4

Just more proof as to who is running the government. What other conclusion could a person come to than that? We have a huge financial crises, everyone agrees the problem is the banks being too big to fail, they are acting like casinos betting other people's money and today they are even bigger. .