German newspaper says the LIBOR fraud was a Conspiracy by a Cartel
Aug 01, 2012
Well, well. Now we see it in the mainstream media. There was a conspiracy after all in the banking world. It is no longer just a theory. It appears that a financial cartel conspired against the previous cartel which conspired to control the money supply itself in 1913.
Libor, Anchor of the Financial World
The Libor and Euribor (Euro Interbank Offered Rate) are used worldwide as the benchmark rates for financial transactions worth hundreds of trillions of euros. When a savings bank issues a loan to a business at a variable interest rate, the loan agreement is based on the Euribor....
But the bankers in the cartel initially had their sights set on a completely different business. They wanted to influence the giant market for interest rate and foreign currency derivatives in their favor. The volume of outstanding transactions in this area amounted to €567 trillion at the end of 2011 alone. Changes of as little as 0.01 percentage points can translate into hundreds of millions in profit or loss for some banks. This makes the lax approach to the calculation of rates taken for years by banks and regulators alike seem all the more astonishing....
The Cartel Emerges
In 2005, a young trader with Moroccan roots came to Barclays: Philippe Moryoussef, who is now 44. For him, it was only one station of many: Société Générale, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Morgan Stanley and, finally, Nomura. The Japanese had let him go when it became clear what role Moryoussef allegedly played in the interest-rate cartel....
It was a conspiratorial group of underdogs who worked for various banks and met at least once a month for a beer or a mojito in New York, London or Frankfurt. By the middle of the last decade, when there seemed to be a surplus of money at the banks, they all had the same problem: They were derided or, worse yet, ignored by their colleagues in the trading rooms of major banks....
By 2005 at the latest, the traders would seem to have begun realizing just how much power they had were they able to collaborate within their small group. There was no need for formal contracts between large institutions, merely agreements among friends. A pointer here, a few traders meeting for lunch there, and soon the group had formed a global cartel that, according to investigators, reached from Japan to Europe to Canada....
In the past, bank manager lapses resulted from their stupidity for having bought securities without understanding them. "Now that was bad enough. But manipulating a market rate is criminal." A portion of the industry, adds the insider, apparently doesn't realize that the writing is on the wall.
The parties involved, including Deutsche Bank and its new co-CEO Jain, cannot expect leniency when charges are investigated. "We can't make any allowances for high-profile names," say officials in the capital.
The big international banks and central banks cannot afford to have investigators crawling around in their business. That would uncover too many other uncomfortable facts. But this latest LIBOR and EURIBOR conspiracy is likely to force the issue and remove the "mystery" from Mystery Babylon.
As the article says, "the writing is on the wall." That is a reference to Daniel 5:5, which occurred the night that Babylon fell.
It's enough to make any banker's loins get loosed. Is there a janitor in the house?