Barclays was busted for manipulating the LIBOR. The London Interbank Offered Rate is the interest rate banks charge to lend to each other. This key interest rate sets most banking transactions, including retail. Manipulating the Libor is like being a casino with crooked roulette wheels and loaded dice.
Barclays has been fined £290m ($450m) for trying to manipulate a key bank interest rate which influences the cost of loans and mortgages.
Marcus Agius will step down from Barclays as soon as Monday, amid fallout from the bank's $453 million settlement of probe into Libor manipulation.
On Wednesday the U.K's Financial Services Authority announced to the world Barclays manipulated the Libor and was fined. Below is some of the FSA's press release:
The FSA has today announced that it has found serious failings in the sale of interest rate hedging products to some small and medium sized businesses (SMEs). We believe that this has resulted in a severe impact on a large number of these businesses. In order to provide as swift a solution to this problem as possible we have today confirmed that we have reached agreement with Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS to provide appropriate redress where mis-selling has occurred.
We've been so busy with bail outs, unemployment, corruption and the destruction of the middle class, we as a nation seem to have put global warming on the back burner. With the country baking, temperatures so high assuredly there will be deaths, let's revisit the economic impact of climate change. Below is NASA's witness global warming in 26 seconds video.
The Supreme court ruled Obamacare's mandate to buy individual insurance is a tax. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. PPACA, stands, but now Obamacare is classified as a tax.
Houston, we have a problem. We need jobs. The never ending political banter on immigration is a droning inane brew of special interests. One thing always is constant. At the back of the pack is America's middle class. We even have various groups supposedly representing U.S. labor who seem to be interested in illegal immigrants instead. Even worse, we have numerous lobbyists spinning out economic fiction, trying to claim offshore outsourcing is good for America or displacing U.S. workers with foreigners is somehow good economically. Neither is true. Worker displacement is worker displacement and if anyone is alive these days, the employment statistics say it all. Indeed we saw the foreign born getting majority of the jobs from 2008-2010. We need jobs for U.S. citizens, American workers. We also need a big legal rubber stamp proclaiming U.S. workers are preferred for all jobs within our shores.
Seems the infamous mathematical probability distribution function, the Gaussian Copula, is at the forefront of controversy once again. It seems those financial engineers, the Quants, the ones who use advanced probability and statistics to model financial markets, upon whose work many derivatives are based, knew the use of Gaussian Copulas was fundamentally flawed.
Moody's downgraded 15 banks, primarily because banks are busy placing bets in the great capital markets gambling casino. As a result of these downgrades, banks borrowing costs will increase and they will have to pony up more collateral to cover their holdings and trades.
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