Libor

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Libor

Issues Beyond Palo Alto, posted by Ted Rudow III, MA, a member of the Palo Alto High School community





Called Libor, which that stands for London Interbank Offered Rate and it 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 - these could have been affected by Libor.

20 other megabanks are now under investigation, including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. Open collusion with other banks to lowball or highball the rates to profit. "The New York Times" reporting, "As unemployment climbed and tax revenue fell the city of Baltimore laid off employees and cut services in the midst of the financial crisis. Its leaders now say the city's troubles were aggravated by bankers' manipulation of this key interest rate linked to hundreds of millions of dollars the city had borrowed."



What you’ve just seen is a cartel in operation, which -- not maybe -- did distort Libor for the benefits of the largest banks in the cartel. It is the largest rigging of prices in the history of the world, by many orders of magnitude. Libor is one example where we left it to banks to themselves to set important benchmarks. Many in the West are naïve about the real plight of the world. There are many who live a life of ease‚ unaware of the hurt that ravishes the world on a daily basis through man's bad choices.



Ted Rudow III, MA