The Economist: Banksters.

The Economist has also legitimized the word “Banksters.” I wonder if the shameless parasites of the Financiers take a critical look at their profession and social purpose. One investment banker like Fully-Verfied, I know who does CDOs for a living, justified the CDOs as great financial products that brought the cost of capital down for many. He said, the demand for CDOs was so high in the mid 2000s, they had no choice but do it. You know who else justifies their toxic products purely because there is a strong demand for their products? Drug dealers.

Banksters, indeed.

I talked a little bit about the LIBOR Gate on my July 6th show. The Economist has this to say in the article titled “Banksters”

“SINCE we have not more power of knowing the future than any other men, we have made many mistakes (who has not during the past five years?), but our mistakes have been errors of judgment and not of principle.” So reflected J.P. Morgan junior in 1933, in the middle of a financial crisis. Today’s bankers can draw no such comfort from their behaviour. The attempts to rig LIBOR (the London inter-bank offered rate), a benchmark interest rate, not only betray a culture of casual dishonesty; they set the stage for lawsuits and more regulation right the way round the globe. This could well be global finance’s “tobacco moment”.

..

The bank and the Bank

The evidence that has emerged from the Barclays investigation reveals two types of bad behaviour. The first was designed to manipulate LIBOR to bolster traders’ profits. Barclays traders pushed their own money-market desks to doctor submissions for LIBOR (and for EURIBOR, a euro-based interest rate put together in Brussels). They were also colluding with counterparts at other banks, making and receiving requests to pass on to their respective submitters. A similar picture of widespread collusion emerges from documents related to the Canadian investigation. This bit of the LIBOR scandal looks less like rogue trading, more like a cartel.

That could end up costing the banks a lot of money. LIBOR is used to set an estimated $800 trillion-worth of financial instruments, affecting the price of everything from simple mortgages to interest-rate derivatives. If attempts to manipulate LIBOR were successful—and the regulators think that Barclays did manage it, on occasion—then this would be the biggest securities fraud in history, affecting investors and borrowers around the world. That opens the door to litigation not just by the direct customers of implicated banks, but by anyone with a financial interest in LIBOR. The lawsuits have already begun.

[full article]

Emphasis is mine. My guess is – nothing will happen to these banks who committed such a massive crime. For, the regulators and even the central bankers are part of the Cartel.