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.