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The American Empire in a Changing World



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Wednesday, August 1, 2012

''To resolve the Libor scandal, we must decide. Do we want to save banks, or our societies?''

From Ian Fraser Blog

''There is no segment of private industry that has grabbed more power than the banking industry… Banks will offer up individual traders as lambs for the sacrificial chopping block, and lawmakers will declare that justice has been done. The traders can protest as much as they want that they were not operating in a vacuum, and that their superiors were very much aware of their machinations, if not outright demanding them, but it will make no difference. Bob Diamond was thrown to the wolves so Mervyn King could stay where he is. King himself made sure of it …

The underlying idea for Libor was always: “by the bankers, for the bankers”. And if anyone involved in setting up Libor back in 1985 now wishes to claim that they had no idea that allowing banks to make up the rates at which they borrowed out of thin air created scope for manipulation, that would insult everyone’s intelligence including yours and mine. The problem is that in today’s climate, this doesn’t keep them from making precisely such claims. And that is very much part of a trend. It has increasingly become acceptable for bankers and politicians alike to deny anything flat out and see what happens, knowing their friends have their backs.''

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