Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Hey you get away with it once why not do it again............and again...........and again................
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates.
Also it appears our attorney general thinks it's better to let them cheat, lie and steal since they are too big to fail. The system isn't just rigged they own it.
"Two of America's top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it's dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to "collateral consequences" in the economy. "
It's quite easy to manipulate something that 99.5% of the population doesn't even know exists. Even if they did, many of them wouldn't even be able to understand it. There's a reason our financial system is so exotic... More opportunity to cheap and bend the rules.
Remember when politicians were claiming banks can regulate themselves? Well, in the Libor scandal the banks were setting the rates themselves and surprise, surprise, they were rigging the game in their favor. Who would have guessed?
It's just another example of why strong regulations with the regulators having the power to force changes on offenders is what is needed.
I've always just assumed, since I was old enough to understand how to balance my checkbook, that the entire game is rigged.
The scary part, is that this very small group who controls our system, and, in essence, way of life, actually believe their actions can be justified for the betterment of society.
One of these days, the people will wise up, and these bankers, CEO's, corrupt politicians, and all the other elite bastards, will be rounded up and brought forth before the judgement of each and every one of us.
Well listening to the folks defend the actions of the police during the "lockdown" there are plenty who don't mind what the powers that be do one way or the other. Complete and utter serfs to their masters. It's taken a while and a lot of hard work but that is where we sit now. Kennedy tried to take on the powers that be at one time and...........
Well listening to the folks defend the actions of the police during the "lockdown" there are plenty who don't mind what the powers that be do one way or the other. Complete and utter serfs to their masters. It's taken a while and a lot of hard work but that is where we sit now. Kennedy tried to take on the powers that be at one time and...........
There are plenty, that don't approve of armed police pointing guns at teenagers and regular people heads and yelling at them.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
