The Daily Beast reports: As the chairman of Barclays resigns in the wake of an interest-rate fixing scandal, the city of London is in crisis and Prime Minister David Cameron has announced an urgent Parliamentary inquiry.

“It’s a turning point,” said Martin Vander Weyer, a former director of the investment arm of the British bank, now known as Barclays Capital. “Three scandals have come in Britain in a perfect storm last week.” The NatWest online bank didn’t work for 10 days because of a software problem. Meanwhile, Barclays was caught mis-selling complex interest-rate insurance to small companies and, more important, a LIBOR scandal has emerged.

The London Interbank trading system, known as LIBOR, and its smaller counterpart, EURIBOR, between them set the benchmark for interest rates around the world. The self-regulated system relies on banks accurately reporting the costs of their own borrowing, but the Financial Service Authority and the U.S. Department of Justice fined Barclays a combined $450 million last week for fixing the rate from 2005 to 2009. The early misreporting was to the benefit of the company’s derivatives traders. During the credit crunch, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, Barclays systematically underreported its borrowing costs in order to appear healthier—and thus avoid the nationalization that overtook other British banks, such as Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Halifax.

“It’s not a victimless crime,” Labour MP John Mann, a member of House of Commons Treasury select committee, told The Daily Beast. “If there’s fraud and misreporting, other people lose out: mortgage holders, other counterparties,” he said. “It’s like insider dealing”

Internal emails published by the Justice Department reveal a culture of greed and apparent insider trades, with one trader thanking another for rigging the rates: “Dude I owe you big time! Come over one day after work and I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger! Thanks for the libor.” The Serious Fraud Office in the U.K. is now investigating the case, with class-action lawsuits pending in the U.S.

Despite the resignation of chairman Marcus Agius, the CEO of Barclays, American-born Bob Diamond, remains in place. He wrote to his staff today to apologize to the thousands working in the retail branches for the misbehavior of the traders in the investment arm and to announce an internal investigation. However, Diamond is being described as “the most hated man in Britain” and is due to face the new parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday.

“Mr. Diamond should be sacked,” said Mann, “and LIBOR should be regulated rather than self-regulated.”

Diamond resigned today.

Umair Haque writes: To the long, dismal list of fatally broken institutions — GDP, governments, schools, corporations — we can add the mysterious Libor, and its conveniently comfortable calculation. It’s difficult to overstate what a pillar of the global economy Libor is — it’s used in setting interest rates that affect the daily lives of pretty much every citizen of every advanced economy across the globe. And it’s difficult to overstate how troubling it is that this, too, is an institution rigged by the few, for the few; that this institution too, is, corrupted.

This scandal isn’t about price-fixing. It’s not about a bank. It’s not even about power and privilege, corruption and compromise. It’s about life, tragedy, and human potential. It’s about the capacity to create a worthwhile future. It is, in short, about you and I, and the places we seek for ourselves in the world.

Let me couch this for you in the pedestrian terms of financial hydraulics — the tawdry terms which seem to substitute for thinking in what’s become of our thin, shallow economic and political discourse. The most basic function of a financial system is to price money. If a financial system can’t undertake that simple task effectively — if the price of money is fixed like a roulette wheel stuck on red — all else must necessarily fail: investment must become malinvestment, speculation must precede creation, “profit” must become divorced from benefit, and wealth is effectively transferred from poor to rich, in a form of quiet but lethally effective institutionalized theft.

Now, let me couch this for you in the human terms of political economy — the terms in which you and I should rightly conceive of an “economy” as the sum of the enduring human good; not merely as a set of pipes for the grease of finance to be injected into.

Who authors the destiny of nations? Which compact governs the relations between the powerless and the privileged? Whose rights are sacrosanct? How are fortunes earned — and spent? What does “wealth” mean? If money is in a basic sense a currency in which the fruits of enterprise past are safely kept, to seed the soil of prosperity tomorrow — and if the value of that money itself is corrupted — can one be said to be a participant in “an economy”? Or is one more a pawn in a rigged game of self-destruction; a mark in a Ponzi scheme; a dull-eyed pack animal to which the engines of extraction are yoked? Does “freedom” — in the most primitive sense, autonomy from the circumscription of one’s own inalienable rights, those basic liberties which don’t just accrue to us, but inhere in us — still allow one freedom? Who’s who — master and servant, mechanism and operator, principal and agent, sovereign and serf?

These are the terms of the debate we’re not having. These are the words that are left unsaid. These are the concepts and ideas on which prosperity itself was built. These are the unspoken phrases that flit like ghosts through what’s left stammeringly unspoken by the finely-suited pundits and so-called “leaders” too cowering and afraid, too tempted and silenced, too timid and too petrified to challenge the primacy of a system that’s leaving millions to choke on the fumes of the collapse of their own futures. [Continue reading…]

Yves Smith writes: In case it isn’t yet apparent to you, the unfolding scandal over manipulation of Libor and its Euro counterpart Euribor is a huge deal. Even though at this point, only Barclays [the fourth largest bank in the world], the UK bank that was first to settle, is in the hot lights, at least 16 other major financial players, which means pretty much everybody, is implicated.

First, Libor is the basis for pricing over $10 trillion of loans. As the CTFC noted:

US dollar Libor is the basis for the settlement of the three-month Eurodollar futures contract traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which had a traded volume in 2011 with a notional value exceeding $564 trillion.

The Wall Street Journal puts total in contracts affected at $800 trillion.

Second is that price fixing is a criminal violation under the Sherman antitrust act. The Department of Justice stressed that Barclays had been the first bank to cooperate with the investigation and had been extremely forthcoming, and for that reason it would not be prosecuted if it complied with the settlement terms for two years. The implication is that the DoJ will not be as generous with other banks involved in the price-fixing scheme. This is an overview from the Financial Times of Barclay’s misdeeds:

The bank admitted that it lowballed estimates of its borrowing costs from late 2007 to May 2009 because it wanted to reassure investors of its strength during the financial crisis and it believed other banks were doing the same. It also admitted that its traders improperly influenced the rate submissions from 2005 to 2008 to make money on derivatives.

Note that, according to Barclays, there were two scandals: one is the usual “rogue traders” sort, which took place from 2005 to 2007 (funny how these CEOs take credit for overall performance for bonus purposes and blame inadequately supervised lower level employees whenever real trouble arises?); the second, as we will discuss, is that Barclays submitted lower rates for the daily Libor “fixing” than its actual funding costs to make itself look healthier than it was during the crisis. [Continue reading…]

Will Hutton writes: Investment banking is an organised scam masquerading as a business. It is defined by endemic conflicts of interest, systemic amoral behaviour and extreme avarice. Many of its senior figures should be serving prison sentences or disgraced – and would have been if British regulators had been weaned off the doctrine of ” light touch” regulation earlier and if the Serious Fraud Office’s budget had not been emasculated by Mr Osborne. It is a tax on wealth generation and an enemy of honest endeavour – the beast that is devouring British capitalism.

Matt Taibbi writes: Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won’t hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you’re probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government’s massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo.

But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from “virtually every state, district and territory in the United States,” according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.

In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What’s more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street’s secret machinations were revealed during the Carollo trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers who spoke in thieves’ cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about “getting a button man to clip the capo,” on tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like “pull a nickel out” or “get to the right level” or “you’re hanging out there” – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime. [Continue reading…]