As Europeans return from August vacations, Greece is at the top of the to-do list. Athens needs another bailout; the Germans may be wary, but are they willing to risk a Grexit? Some hedge funds are nibbling at Greek debt, increasingly optimistic of further European assistance. Another way to bet on Europe: Read More
Daily Libor: Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive officer Stephen Hester told The Guardian that ”RBS is one of the banks tied up in Libor. We’ll have our day in that particular spotlight as well.” At least two banks have joined Deutsche Bank in cooperating with European investigations into the rigging of Libor and Read More
Geithner visits Congress: Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner will testify before the House Financial Services Committee today about the rate-rigging scandal, where it figures he’ll be asked why the New York Fed failed to alert other regulators when a Barclays employee told the Fed that the bank was rigging Libor in April 2008. (Mr. Geithner Read More
Your papers, please: Texas Republican Randy Neugebauer of the House Financial Services committee asked the New York Fed for all of its communications pertaining to Libor with the 16 banks under investigation for manipulating interbank lending rates dated between August 2007 and July of this year.
Hey, big boy: Several groups of traders are Read More
From outside the elite preserves of the financial industry, Britain’s LIBOR scandal follows a wearily familiar narrative arc: Yes, a leading investment bank has confessed to gaming a central borrowing index—the so-called London Interbank Offered Rate, which establishes how much banks charge each other to borrow money. And yes, that bank—Barclays of London—has coughed up 290 million pounds in fines to stave off the prospect of a criminal prosecution. But jaded consumers of financial news can be forgiven for thinking that this all amounts to the perennial status quo for the investment class, in the city and on Wall Street alike. Haven’t these characters always sought to live by their own self-seeking code—and haven’t fund managers long been little more than glorified corruptionists? If we systemically prosecute this sort of behavior, are we just futilely attempting to issue a restraining order against human nature?
In reality, the LIBOR dustup is a very big deal—and largely because of its very routine profile. Read More
Today was the day that suddenly everyone knew that Libor was rigged, always. Not municipalities which entered into credit default swaps, maybe—though in which case, who was giving them advice?—but nearly everyone else. And absolutely the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which revealed in response to a congressional inquiry that a Barclays Read More
