Ian Fraser wrote:Finally, we have evidence that banks and bankers are not above the law in the United Kingdom. It seems the courts have finally woken up to the fact that allowing them to lie, cheat, deceive and defraud without legal impediment may not be a particularly good idea. As such, yesterday’s appeal court ruling, which reveals RBS to have behaved in what might, at best, be described as a slippery and underhand fashion, is a cause for celebration which I hope will come to be seen as a turning point.
Three appeal court judges yesterday overturned an earlier court judgment in asset-management group Highland Capital Management‘s long-running dispute with the Royal Bank of Scotland. The judges said the earlier verdict had been obtained through the “fraud of RBS”, given that one of the Edinburgh-based bank’s bankers, a former leveraged loan trader, Sam Griffiths, had lied in court (full judgement available via Cooke, Young & Keiden).
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools - Douglas Adams.
Until I see one of the b@stards rattling his tin mug along the bars, I won't believe a word.
"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."
If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.
"It's a double conspiracy," says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. "It's the height of criminality."
"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."
Well I'll be buggered. Oh wait. I *am* being buggered, and so is everybody else. God only knows how this ends, or how much more there is still to come out.
"We fail to mandate economic sanity because our brains are addled by....compassion." (Garrett Hardin)
JavaScriptDonkey wrote:I suppose it depends if you are owed interest or have to pay it.
Still, is this condemnation of price fixing tacit support for a capitalist free market?
Free markets work for some things and not for others. I completely support free markets in chocolate bars but believe that e.g. power, and banks, where the costs of failure are much higher, should be under much greater scrutiny than chocolate bars.
featherstick wrote:
Free markets work for some things and not for others. I completely support free markets in chocolate bars but believe that e.g. power, and banks, where the costs of failure are much higher, should be under much greater scrutiny than chocolate bars.
No, I can't agree. Chocolate bars ought to be free.
JavaScriptDonkey wrote:
Still, is this condemnation of price fixing tacit support for a capitalist free market?
No. If you have a system that's supposed to be free, then it should be free. That's a question of legality and honesty and entirely independent of other questions like whether a free market system is itself the "best" system, whatever "best" means.
To put it another way: even if you think free market economics is unethical, or inappropriate in post peak-oil times, a supposedly free market that is actually being secretly rigged by large financial organisations in their own interests is quite clearly even worse. Much worse, in fact.
"We fail to mandate economic sanity because our brains are addled by....compassion." (Garrett Hardin)
"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."
I wonder if any speakers will mention declining energy density.
I wonder if I'm being optimistic.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
The dramatic inside story of the scandal that ripped through the banking industry in 2012 and took down a banking legend, Bob Diamond.
In the first of a new three-part series, bank bosses, regulators and politicians give frank first-hand accounts of how the balance of power has finally started to shift away from the masters of the universe.
Ironically, this game-changing crisis erupted over the widespread rigging of an obscure rate-setting mechanism, Libor, rather than over the tumult of the financial crash.
Some say it took this latest scandal to expose a profit-at-all-costs cynicism that they believe has corrupted the heart of our banking system; all agree things need to change.
Former Barclays chairman Marcus Agius, RBS boss Sir Philip Hampton, deputy governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey and Jean-Claude Trichet examine the difficult new dilemmas about what we want and need from our bankers, and whether we can trust them again.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools - Douglas Adams.
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