Central Bank's silence over known Libor rigging!

As pointed out on this blog at the time, and again more recently, it can be seen from press reports at the time that the New York Fed and Bank of England knew about false reporting of borrowing rates to fix Libor levels during the 2008 crisis, and that  such rigging can therefore have only been continuing with specific Downing Street approval.

The latest reports from Reuters, dated today and linked here, on Timothy Geithner's own knowledge of these goings on, seems significant in highlighting the hypocrisy in the present reporting of what is essentially the collapse of the West's entire economic system.

Libor truths will eclipse Lords Reform, Coalition Woes and transform British politics!

Sky News has a leaked memo this morning from the Barclays Bank Executive Board in a report linked here, from which comes this quote:

In a memo sent to staff yesterday evening and which has been leaked to (Mark Kleinman, the article's author), the nine members of the bank's executive committee warned that the Libor crisis should not distract them from the core task of safeguarding Barclays' vast balance sheet.
"The macro-environment remains febrile, especially in Europe. We have to remain vigilant on balance sheet exposures and risk management. In short, our focus must remain on capital, funding and liquidity; improving returns; and driving income growth."
The memo, co-written by Marcus Agius, Barclays' outgoing chairman, apologised for the impact of the rate-fixing episode on the bank's staff, but hinted that its rivals were likely to be hit even harder than the £290m in fines imposed on Barclays.
"As other banks settle with authorities, and their details become public, and various governments' inquiries shed more light, our situation will eventually be put in perspective."

Of course it is not just other banks. The true scandal and the eventual truth that will emerge is that it was the Central Bankers and the then governing politicians in Downing Street who conspired to create the crisis.

The posting on my blog from 24th September 2008, quoting a report from Bloomberg gives the entire game away from this one statement:

"There's no real term funding markets except for central banks," said Meyrick Chapman, a fixed-income strategist in London at UBS AG. "The Libor is meaningless. It's for unsecured lending and there is no unsecured lending as far as I can see."

Therefore it is obvious that if there was no unsecured lending in September 2008, and you can read my blog archive for that month by clicking here to recall the prevailing chaos, then as Libor rates continued to be issued, they appeared only as a result of a conspiracy between Central Bankers presumably at the behest of their political masters with ultimate responsibility resting with Gordon Brown in Downing Street, (already widely suspected of having become almost completely unhinged).

The fact that Brown, Darling and those others New Labour ministers and placemen involved have yet to be called to account, speaks volumes on Britain's present methods of governance, in which Lords Reform can immediately be seen to be a complete irrelevance.

An American set to blow Britain's Establishment apart on Independence Day?

There is no doubt that the appearance of the former CEO of Barclays Bank before the Commons Treasury Committee this afternoon at 2pm London Time, will provide the biggest firework of this 4th July this side of the Atlantic. The Telegraph article stating that the blame will initially be passed to the Bank of England's P.W. Tucker is here.

At the end of this post I have pasted another posting from this blog showing that the moves in Libor and their significance were fully publicly known and their impact debtated.

This blog did not mainly concentrate on the Libor aspect of the unravelling of our financial system underway at that time of course. It also full tracked the dishonest, and more probably, the criminal activities of those Labour leaders in power at the time and their honours and wealth hungry professional mandarins. Some postings on that aspect are sometimes available from the archives of this blog. Some of the more significant ones that are not, I will try to paste from time to time this morning on this blog, with a twitter link, but without further comment.

It would be truly ironic, would it not, if the Labour Government loosening of extradition restrictions to the USA allowed us to eventually witness leading former New Labour Party ex-Ministers and others of their henchman and manipulators being carted off to the USA for US Federal criminal financial crimes and eventually serving time behind bars, where they so fully deserve to be?

Here is the other referenced posting from this blog on Libor in January 2008, others on that particular topic are among yesterday's postings:

Friday, January 11, 2008
LIBOR jitters and small businesses fears
Reuters reports jumps in the one and three month Libor interest rates signalling more financial storms ahead for sterling, read here. Meantime the pound crashes to a new record low against the euro at 75 pence following weak manafacturing figures although such activity now only accounts for 15 per cent of this once mighty industrial economy. Small businessmen are surely right to be demanding their promised referendum on the EU Treaty, a report on that is linked here.

Two Warnings on LIBOR from Ironies Too in 2008 and 2011!

Two postings from this blog proving the present LIBOR kerfuffle is all froth:

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Libor dead? Central Banks Rule? Chaos spreads!

The above posting concluded with this paragraph which makes a complete mockery of all the fake outrage in Parliament at the moment:

"There's no real term funding markets except for central banks," said Meyrick Chapman, a fixed-income strategist in London at UBS AG. "The Libor is meaningless. It's for unsecured lending and there is no unsecured lending as far as I can see."

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Pillars of western capitalism tremble!

This latter concluded with the following perfectly clear statement:

....far more worrying IMHO, implies the deliberate manipulation of Libor, which forms the basis for financial adjustments in many "real" (ie non intra-financial institutions) commercial dealings. Read here When I used it for large oil company contracts, I was assured by my financial and accounting specialists, that LIBOR was the Gold Standard of independence, is this still the case?


If Libor has been fiddled, where has trust now found a home?

How Barclays once tried to trouser my cash!

Nothing much surprises me about Britain's bigger banks. I moved my account from NatWest to Barclays after the former paid my salary cheque into somebody else's account for three months running, without notification until threats were issued when I consequently became overdrawn, and a subsequent refusal to remove the charges they therefore imposed nor any attempt to issue sufficient apology for the inconvenience caused. That was in the late nineteen-sixties when my particular Barclays experience began.

I gave up on Britain for the second time in the late nineteen-eighties, when my current account was still with Barclays.  For the British business I had started up in the interim, I chose to bank with Lloyds, comment enough  on my long Barclays experience. Paperwork involved in changing regular payments, like thousands others I suspect, had kept me with that bank.

As the years overseas passed by, my use of this UK current account dwindled, thus without notification Barclays closed the account. In 2002 my daughter was to attend a British University, in expectation of her needing funds and opening her own account I transferred a largish sum, sufficient for accomodation expenses and all the usual undergraduate purchase that would be necessary, to my Barclays account, fortunately from a UK branch of HSBC.  When I presented myself at the Barclays branch of the University town concerned, to draw that cash as I believed I had arranged, I was told they had neither record of my account nor of the funds transfer.

Eventually as I had happily made such transfer through a UK bank, I recouped the potential loss of those not inconsiderable funds, I was too dejected and defeated to pursue the struggle for the lossed balance on the closed account. Nor did I have the time or energy to pursue the matter with the supposed UK banking regulators, why waste one's energy when such possibly dishonest inconsistencies seemed to be becoming the norm.

So am I surprised at the news of Barclay's manipulation of Libor and the apparent unwillingness of the UK police or criminal prosecutors to get involved? Not at all!

What does surprise me is this aspect, which the UK media seems to have so far  to have left unreported or commented upon: Libor (as explained by a regulator interviewed on TV in this case,) has input from sixteen London based banks, interest rates paid are submitted and the higher four and lower four are dropped before averaging the other eight to set the index interest rate level. It appears for any manipulation to be effective at least five banks would need to be involved, which banks, therefore, are the others involved with Barclays.