LIBORgate: less than full disclosure?

Diamond accused of not being fully open with MPs walks with a now-confirmed £2m severance package.

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He'll walk; Tucker'll walk - they always do. When complete global financial collapse is the alternative to fraud, the law will turn into a pragmatist. This is clear from the fact that countless subprime loans were linked to LIBOR, which is to say that the rate of interest at which incredibly risky borrowers borrowed (the so-called NINJA loans - no income, no job, (no) assets. WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING?) was linked directly to the rate at which banks received short loans from other banks in order to lend. It was a patriotic act to fudge LIBOR and continue the illusion that it was safe for banks to lend short to each other (rather than knowingly pass around an HIV-infected needle at a bag and spoon party). patriotic to capital and Smithsian self-interest, that is.

LIBORgate: Diamond Bob polishes himself off

faces grilling of MPs. Senior Bank of England official knew about the scandal.

Let's see how far they take the same line as Murdoch and get away with it: "I didn't know about LIBOR manipulation by people in my division." Didn't work for the Nazis at Nuremberg. Some consistency please, people! The law is the law!

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LIBORgate

Let's start with a fundamental truth: rigging votes is less important than rigging money. When a vote is rigged, you end up with a candidate very slightly different from the one that won the most votes. When money is rigged - by banks manipulating the rate at which they will lend to each other - you set yourself up for a massive redistribution of wealth. It is the selfsame systemic risk problem that caused the Credit Crunch. The money Barclays itself would have made on manipulating the rate is like the tiny circumference of a thrown stone as it breaks through the surface of a calm pond; it is dwarfed by the ripples which emanate from the source of the impact. Five years' worth of manipulated LIBOR is the latest storm in managed capitalism, the main problem of which is not corruption or venality - for they exist in all walks of life and to a degree never smaller in history - but scale. The ability of single events to spiral out of control and destroy not just banks but countries is the ineluctable causal principle of our networked society.