Don’t Blink, or You’ll Miss Another Bailout

[Octafish]

21. Save the condescension for the insiders who benefit from Fed policy.

Picking Our Pockets and Lining Theirs

Banksters Take Us to the Brink

by BILL MOYERS and MICHAEL WINSHIP
CounterPunch
Weekend Edition July 13-15, 2012

EXCERPT...

And what a business! You’ve most likely been hearing about the newest scandal in banking, centering on Barclays Bank in Great Britain and something called Libor. That stands for London Interbank Offered Rate and involves a group of bankers who set a daily interest rate affecting trillions of dollars of transactions around the world. Your home mortgage, your college debt, your credit card fees; all of these could have been affected by Libor.

Now you would think the rates would be set by market forces, right? Aren’t they what makes the world go ‘round? But it turns out some of those insiders were manipulating the index for their own gain, to make their banks look better off during the financial crisis, lower their borrowing costs, and raise their profits – by cheating. Picking our pockets and lining theirs.

SNIP...

“In testimony last week before the British Parliament, former Barclays chief executive Robert E. Diamond said the bank had repeatedly brought to the attention of U.S. regulators — as well as U.K. regulators — the problems that the bank was experiencing in the Libor market.

“He said the bank’s warnings to regulators that Libor was artificially low did not lead to action. Barclays’ regulator in the United States is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which was run at the time by current Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/13/banksters-take-us-to-the-brink/