Banks Paying Huge Fines for Wall Street Scam

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

30 June 12

A Huge Break in the LIBOR Banking Investigation

his is a huge story:

On Wednesday, Barclays won the race to reach a deal with U.S. and British regulators, beating UBS, which was reportedly the first bank to begin cooperating with international antitrust authorities. Barclays agreed to pay at least $450 million to resolve government investigations of manipulation of Libor and the Euro interbank offered rate (or Euribor): $200 million to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, $160 million tothe criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice and $92.8 million to Britain's Financial Services Authority.

I wrote about the Libor investigation in the current issue of Rolling Stone, in "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia," about muni bond bid-rigging. Throughout this spring, while the Carollo bid-rigging case played out in a Manhattan courtroom, negotiations between banks and regulators were going on in this far larger cartel-corruption case. It’s been clear for some time now that a number of players had begun cooperating, and the only question was which bank was going to settle first.

Despite widespread expectation that it would be UBS, it turned out to be Barclays. You know how in Law and Order Jack McCoy always puts the two murder accomplices in separate rooms and tells them both that whoever talks first wins? Something like that happened here. In any case, the Department of Justice filing on the settlement contained excerpts of emails and other evidence that recall the taped phone conversations in the Carollo case: once again, we have seemingly incontrovertible evidence of wide-scale market manipulation. From Alison Frankel at Reuters:

Barclays employees agreed to manipulate the rates they submitted to the banking authority that oversees the daily Libor report for seemingly anyone who asked them to monkey with it: senior Barclays officials concerned that the bank would look weak if it reported too high a borrowing rate; interest rate swap traders trying to improve Barclays' derivatives trading position; even former Barclays traders begging for favors. We're talking naked, blatant manipulation. Here's one exchange cited in the DOJ filing:

Trader: "Can you pls continue to go in for 3m Libor at 5.365 or lower, we are all very long cash here in ny."

Libor rate submitter: "How long?"

Trader: "Until the effective date goes over year end (i.e. turn drops out) if possible."

Submitter: "Will do my best sir."

This is unbelievable, shocking stuff. A sizable chunk of the world’s adjustable-rate investment vehicles are pegged to Libor, and here we have evidence that banks were tweaking the rate downward to massage their own derivatives positions. The consequences for this boggle the mind. For instance, almost every city and town in America has investment holdings tied to Libor. If banks were artificially lowering the rates to beef up their trading profiles, that means communities all over the world were cheated out of ungodly amounts of money.

First there were huge bid-rigging settlements for Chase, UBS, Bank of America, GE and Wachovia. Now we’ve got a $450 million settlement for Barclays for Libor manipulation, and one imagines this won’t be the end of it. Anyway, more on this to come soon, and if you’re wondering, yes, there should be a lot more press on this.

---------------------------------------------------

Another Domino Falls in the LIBOR Banking Scam: Royal Bank of Scotland

Another one bites the dust. The Royal Bank of Scotland is about to be fined $233 million (£150 million pounds) for its role in the Libor-rigging scandal. It joins Barclays as the first banks to walk the plank in what should be, but so far is not, the most sensational financial corruption story since the crash of 2008.

Many of the banks implicated in the Libor mess have also been targeted in the various municipal bond bid-rigging investigations, and RBS is no different – its subsidiary Natwest is also a defendant in the major civil lawsuit in the bid-rigging case. The cases aren't related, except in the sense that they both involve manipulation and anticompetitive cooperation. It's going to be harder and harder to make the case that the major banks do not routinely cooperate at the expense of the public when it serves their purposes to do so.

The news that RBS is involved comes with a perverse twist. This is from the Times UK:

The bank, which is 82 per cent owned by the taxpayer, is preparing for a political firestorm over the affair because it believes that it has no power to claw back bonuses from the traders responsible. Instead, the expected fines would be borne by the shareholders — largely the Government.

Libor manipulation is a crime that already robs the public to create bonuses for bankers. By artificially lowering interest rates, the banks caused cities, towns, countries, and other public entities to receive smaller returns on their variable-rate investment holdings. If it turns out that taxpayers end up paying the fine for RBS's crime of robbing taxpayers, how perfect would that be?