LONDON – Barclays became the first bank to be ordered to stand trial in a British court over damages stemming from manipulation of the Libor interest rate after a High Court ruling on Monday.
Guardian Care Homes, a residential care home operator based in Wolverhampton, is suing Barclays for up to 37 million pounds ($59 million) over the alleged mis-selling of interest rate hedging products known as swaps.
“Today is a huge milestone with a trial now going forward to determine whether these financial products should be declared void,” Guardian Care Homes’ chief executive Gary Hartland said after the ruling.
The case could also lead to new revelations about the Libor scandal after Guardian Care Homes asked for documents relating to the affair to be disclosed.
The company says it should be fully compensated for its losses because the swap rates were based on the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor). Barclays agreed to pay $450 million in fines to U.S. and British authorities in June to settle allegations that it manipulated Libor and other key interest rates. More than a dozen other banks are also being investigated.
Global financial markets are awash in hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of derivatives. By some estimates, the total amount exceeds one quadrillion.
Derivatives played a central role in the 2008 credit crisis, as they had a brutal multiplying effect on the magnitude of the carnage. As a bad asset was written down, oftentimes there were derivative contracts written against it that resulted in total losses 10x greater than the initial write-down.
But what exactly are derivatives? How do they work?
If you don’t know who the sucker at the card table is, it’s you.
~ old gambler’s saying
What do the following have in common?
LIBOR, Bernie Madoff, MF Global, Peregrine Financial, zero-percent interest rates, the Social Security and Medicare entitlement funds, many state and municipal pension funds, mark-to-model asset values, quote stuffing and high frequency trading (HFT), and debt-based money?
The answer is that every single thing in that list is an example of market rigging, fraud, or both.
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss a financial journalist so dangerous the frontpage of the Financial Times dare not speak his name and the semaphore of fraud and fraud flows that is high frequency trading and silver manipulation. They also talk about blonde bimbo regulators and the self-police force that never finds any evidence crimes they themselves have committed. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to whistleblower Paul Moore, a former Head of Risk at HBOS, about financial holocaust and the City of London’s role in enabling banking fraud.
State-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland confirmed on Friday it has dismissed a number of employees for misconduct as a result of its investigations into the Libor interest rate rigging scandal and, along with other banks, is still under investigation by regulators.
Germany’s biggest bank faces regulatory action after admitting complicity in rate-fixing scandal along with Barclays
Germany’s biggest bank, Deutsche Bank, prepared the ground for regulatory action in the Libor rigging scandal by admitting that a “limited number” of its staff had been involved.
As Swiss bank UBS insisted it was not at the centre of the interest rate debacle, Deutsche said “action had been taken accordingly” against those staff found to have been involved. UBS, as the first bank to reveal the existence of investigations into Libor, is receiving leniency for co-operating with inquiries.
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the virtual virtual economy getting hit by a dustbowl and there are no gully washers or toad stranglers on the horizon to bring reliefe; meanwhile out in the virtual real economy it’s all the bath-salts and beer you can drink and scalps for sale in California as eminent domain falls into the hands of private bankers. In the second half, Max interviews Teri Buhl about the possibility of San Bernardino county using eminent domain to seize mortgages from one set of rich private investors to give them to another set of rich private investors.
In this episode, Max Keiser presents a double header with co-host, Stacy Herbert, to discuss crime and punishment in the financial sector. In London, JP Morgan banker, Tony Blair, has responded to the Keiser Report with his claim that hanging 20 bankers will not help and that, in fact, he asserts, public anger with the financial crisis is wrong. They also discuss the ‘blazer over cuffs look’ being the new black this season as Sean Fitzpatrick is arrested in Dublin, while over in Pennsylvania, Joe Paterno’s statue is draped in blue tarpaulin and hauled away as bond investors punish the university with higher rates and Moody’s threatens a downgrade. Finally, in Los Angeles, victims of vandalism are shocked to discover that it was a senior UBS banker who was smashing windows with a slingshot.
There is no point in recapping the ongoing vendetta between former SIGTARP Neil Barofsky and former head of the NY Fed, and current Treasury secretary and resident TurboTax expert Tim Geithner. One need but follow the former on Twitter for a quick and concise sampling of the sentiments harbored vis-a-vis the latter. However, in the following interview Barfosky does touch on some points which in the context of the recent Liborgate, should be brought front and center, especially since the increasingly apathetic US audience seems to not care about one bit (as opposed to their distant cousins across the Atlantic for whom Lieborgate has become a daily distraction). Namely, what Barofsky says is that Geithner and other regulators who allowed Lieborgate to proceed should not only lose their job but we should “see [Geithner] in handcuffs.” Sadly that will never happen as it would actually be a deterrent to future crime among the highest echelons of America: something which is just not allowed to happen in a system whose very survival is increasingly reliant on rampant criminality.
While Geithner pushed for broader reforms of LIBOR, he did not explicitly warn of possible rate manipulations and neglected to notify U.S. regulators at the Department of Justice, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission to the wrongdoing, notes Barofsky.
It was a “message to the banks ‘if we commit fraud, we break the rules, don’t worry, we’re too big — they’ll never bring the appropriate steps against us,'” Barofsky says in an interview with The Daily Ticker. “And that is why we’ve had scandal after scandal after scandal.”
This was a “global conspiracy to fix one of the most important interest rates in the world,” Barofsky continues. “[Geithner] heard this information and looked the other way. Geithner and other regulators should be held accountable, they should be fired across the board. If they knew about an ongoing fraud, and they didn’t do anything about it, they don’t deserve to have their jobs. I hope we see people in handcuffs.”
Full clip:
There is no point in recapping the ongoing vendetta between former SIGTARP Neil Barofsky and former head of the NY Fed, and current Treasury secretary and resident TurboTax expert Tim Geithner. One need but follow the former on Twitter for a quick and concise sampling of the sentiments harbored vis-a-vis the latter. However, in the following interview Barfosky does touch on some points which in the context of the recent Liborgate, should be brought front and center, especially since the increasingly apathetic US audience seems to not care about one bit (as opposed to their distant cousins across the Atlantic for whom Lieborgate has become a daily distraction). Namely, what Barofsky says is that Geithner and other regulators who allowed Lieborgate to proceed should not only lose their job but we should “see [Geithner] in handcuffs.” Sadly that will never happen as it would actually be a deterrent to future crime among the highest echelons of America: something which is just not allowed to happen in a system whose very survival is increasingly reliant on rampant criminality.
While Geithner pushed for broader reforms of LIBOR, he did not explicitly warn of possible rate manipulations and neglected to notify U.S. regulators at the Department of Justice, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission to the wrongdoing, notes Barofsky.
It was a “message to the banks ‘if we commit fraud, we break the rules, don’t worry, we’re too big — they’ll never bring the appropriate steps against us,'” Barofsky says in an interview with The Daily Ticker. “And that is why we’ve had scandal after scandal after scandal.”
This was a “global conspiracy to fix one of the most important interest rates in the world,” Barofsky continues. “[Geithner] heard this information and looked the other way. Geithner and other regulators should be held accountable, they should be fired across the board. If they knew about an ongoing fraud, and they didn’t do anything about it, they don’t deserve to have their jobs. I hope we see people in handcuffs.”
“Most important to note about James Holmes, however, this report says, is that his father, Robert Holmes, was said to have been scheduled to testify within the next few weeks before a US Senate panel on the largest bank fraud scandal in world history that is currently unfolding and threatens to destabilize and destroy the Western banking system. Robert Holmes, whose “blueblood” family links go back to the Mayflower, is known throughout the global banking community as being the creator of one of the most sophisticated computer algorithms ever developed and is credited with developing predictive models for financial services; credit and fraud risk models, first and third party application fraud models and internet/online banking fraud models.
Educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, Robert Holmes is currently the senior lead scientist with the American credit score company FICO, which was formally known as Fair, Isaac and Company, and which every American citizen is beholden to should they need to borrow money.”
Mind you I am not saying that there is any sort of conspiracy involved here, however it has to make you stop and wonder, “what are the chances that two of America’s most volatile issues — gun control and the ongoing banking and mortgage crisis and scandal — could be countenanced by a single family?”
THE UK’s largest bank HSBC could be formally dragged into the Libor investigation for the first time after it emerged links between one of its traders and peers at other banks were at the centre of investigations by financial regulators.
Watchdogs including the FSA are understood to be looking at a ring of traders at banks including HSBC, Credit Agricole, Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank suspected of colluding to manipulate inter bank lending rates.
Traders, including Didier Sandler at HSBC, are understood to have come to regulators’ attention after exchanging emails with Barclays’ former euroswaps dealer, Phillipe Moryoussef.
Visited with old friends Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now! this morning. The topic was LiBOR, although there is a second segment that will be appearing online that covers the muni bid-rigging case as well.
One editorial note: I said “tens of trillions” of losses at one point when I meant “tens of billions.” Later in the interview, which thankfully didn’t air this morning, I forgot Bill Richardson’s name. I think the heat is melting some data in my brain this week. Apologies all around, and thanks once again to Amy and Juan.
Was on Viewpoint with the inimitable Eliot Spitzer last night and joined Dennis Kelleher from Better Markets in discussing some of the more upsetting recent revelations from the LIBOR banking scandal — including most notably the not-so-surprising revelation that Tim Geithner was apprised of the rate-rigging as far back as 2008.
P.S. I advise everyone to check out the Godzilla-v.-Mothra death-battle between Spitzer and Maria Bartiromo from last Friday on her show on CNBC. Maria’s always been a little nuts, but this latest crusade to rewrite history and cleanse ex-AIG chief Hank Greenberg of culpability in a fraud scandal that at the time led to the biggest financial settlement ever paid is an absolute head-scratcher.
According to news reports, UK banks fixed the London interbank borrowing rate (Libor) with the complicity of the Bank of England (UK central bank) at a low rate in order to obtain a cheap borrowing cost. The way this scandal is playing out is that the banks benefitted from borrowing at these low rates. Whereas this is true, it also strikes us as simplistic and as a diversion from the deeper, darker scandal.
Banks are not the only beneficiaries of lower Libor rates. Debtors (and investors) whose floating or variable rate loans are pegged in some way to Libor also benefit. One could argue that by fixing the rate low, the banks were cheating themselves out of interest income, because the effect of the low Libor rate is to lower the interest rate on customer loans, such as variable rate mortgages that banks possess in their portfolios. But the banks did not fix the Libor rate with their customers in mind. Instead, the fixed Libor rate enabled them to improve their balance sheets, as well as help to perpetuate the regime of low interest rates. The last thing the banks want is a rise in interest rates that would drive down the values of their holdings and reveal large losses masked by rigged interest rates.
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