Why are central banks pouring money into banks, really? Why aren’t governments printing money to pour into ailing economies but aiding and abetting central banks instead? It’s because central banks are independent supra-national bodies who have been ceded monetary power by governments almost everywhere to benefit banks and bankers the world over, who are their only constituents, and for all intents and purposes, effectively “own” legislators and governments.
The Libor scandal is about to get a whole lot worse. And, that’s the good news.
Not only are at least twenty more big banks under investigation as part of a massive fraud to manipulate interbank lending rates that affect some $800 trillion in loans and derivatives, but the Bank of England is about to take center stage in the scandal.
And that’s bad news for central banks around the world.
Well, actually, it could be good news, as in really good news if it’s the beginning of the end of what central banks do to manipulate free markets to the benefit of their only real constituents, the world’s big banks.
First the good news.
It’s already come out that traders at Barclays with huge derivatives positions leaned on co-workers who sit on “panels” that submit internal bank borrowing cost data to Thompson Reuters, who averages the middle lot of submissions to determine Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) “fixings” (not my word, but actually the established nomenclature for what it apparently is that they do…as in “fix” rates) all under the auspices of the British Banking Association.
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