From my reading, the impact on mortgages would have been limited to those with adjustable rate mortgages. IIRC, only 40% of US mortgage holders used adj. rates.

Clarification -- not saying scandal didn't distort fixed rate mortgages too, but the article I read when this broke implied that the impact was limited to adjustable rate mortgages.

wondering whether 16 of the world's largest banks have perpetrated the biggest fraud in history.

Of course they did and there's only one way to end it...

I think this will get swept under the rug and certainly won't be a talking point in the election. Most voters couldn't even tell you what LIBOR stands for.

But I thought banks were just being stupid?

Stealing $500 billion sounds like something a smart crook would do.

Just getting my head around this. So they moved the number up to screw every person on the planet. The moves down came on the days it would screw the pension holders? So the needs of the bankers come before the needs of the government workers too. Is that about right?

Yep.

So libor is like an that was easy button to screw every single human on the planet. And their children's children?

This is an unattributed entry from/on Maxkeiser.com, is another WOW, just OMG WOW:

http://maxkeiser.com/2012/07/12/any-ques....

Removal of Fed examiners hurt JPMorgan supervision
40 experienced Fed bank examiners discovered discrepancies in JP Morgans books in early 2011.

So all 40 of the Federal Reserve bank examiners were removed from JPMorgan Chase in mid-2011

The regulator replaced “virtually all of its roughly 40 examiners” at the bank with new inexperienced ones
fresh out of school. None of the new examiners had any previous experience , they were being trained on
the job.

The new crew did not understand the bank, which has more than $2 trillion of assets on its balance sheet.

At the time, JP Morgan’s Chief Investment Office was increasing its bets on credit derivatives and changing a model for measuring risk in the unit.

The New York Fed and JP Morgan declined to comment, the paper said.

A JP Morgan spokesman declined to comment. Officials at the New York Fed did not immediately return Reuters’ calls for comment.

But no crimes where committed!!!!11!!11!!!!

Found the reference and tickered it.

Quote:

Libertarians, who take an oath called the "Non-Aggression Principle", which states that one does not believe in the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals.

How exactly would ANY Law be ACTIVELY ENFORCED without the initiation of force?

How would the payment of Taxes that an Individual or Institution does NOT wish to pay be coerced without the initiation of force?

WHO defines what IS or IS NOT a "Political or Social Goal"?

How can Voters be convinced that a Politician having made such an Oath to abide by the "Non-Aggression Principle" be taken seriously when the US Government as it is presently constituted can ONLY function via initiation of force?
-A 'Commander In Chief' Who has eschewed the use of FORCE would deal with ( perceived ) Foreign Aggressions or rampant Domestic criminality such as rampant Bank Fraud by what means exactly?

How can Courts enFORCE judgments civilly or criminally without force?

Frankly, as much as attractive as elements of the Libertarian Ideology are; I have yet to hear ANY explanation of how criminality or blatantly anti-social behavior can effectively be dealt with sans FORCE.


"We are not invading your Country." said the Spokesperson for the Foreign Army at the Border.

"We are not coming to steal your property or******your daughters!" said the Spokesperson for the Gangbangers at the door.

"We are Legally Protected Agents of your duly elected and legitimate Government acting in your best interests!" said the Spokesperson for the Police with the No-Knock Warrant.

"We are just doing God's work helping to support a robust and inclusive economy!" said the Spokesperson for the Banking Syndicate that counterfeits and launders and robo-signs legal documents for the purpose of stealing property.

Of, course: I could go on and on

WHAT is the Libertarian answer to such examples as above?


While Theft via such as LIBOR Manipulation is NOT usually conceived as an initiation of force non-consensual wealth extraction was achieved.
-I suppose that crimes NOT involving actual blatant PHYSICAL VIOLENCE are merely to be borne perpetually by 'good' Libertarians?


-Maybe some clarifications as to how ACTUAL ( ? ) Libertarians might 'Govern' effectively would be useful... 'cause as much as I would like to: I cannot visualize solutions to certain anti-social or aggressive activities without the utilization of Force.


To ME the contemporary Libertarian problem is the same old Libertarian Conundrum: How to enFORCE ANYTHING effectively without using FORCE.


I reserve the right to counter ANY & ALL initiations of Force as I alone define such -WITH whatever amounts of Force I deem prudent.
-Apparently I'm NOT a Libertarian....


Seriously: sometimes You just gotta shoot/hang/incinerate the Bastards to make Them stop stealing/raping/killing: how ****ing difficult is this to understand?

Quote:

I reserve the right to counter ANY & ALL initiations of Force as I alone define such -WITH whatever amounts of Force I deem prudent.

That's libertarian. The key word in that quote is "initiate".

Someone elected to mediate differences (govern, if you will) shouldn't use force to get compliance.

But if someone uses force on you, they initiated, and any response is not an initiation of force.

The only Labels that ever truly fit me were husband,father,friend and stand up guy. All others like stupid,tool,fool, democrat/republican dont fit me.

As a stand up guy you can mess with me and if I take it thats my choice. But if you mess with my kids. That is another story. Yes this is an uphill battle. Get over it. If you want something done right YOU will have to do it.

We need to bring as many good people into the light of truth as we can. We dont need followers we need everyone to be a leader. The high road is always uphill.

Let's call it what it is.

This is a colonial tax collected by the gentry of England. Wasn't there some unpleasantness surrounding this whole issue a few generations ago?

$120B/yr is an extremely conservative number. I view the "estimations" of how much it might cost a $100k mortgage holder through the same lens as Dimon's "estimations" of JPM's losses via the London whale (both out of London -- hmm).

Using the same ratio of PR number/reality, and round off for simplicity, that puts us ~$500B/yr in un-voted-for taxes flowing across the pond.

Hmm. $500B/yr would fix a lot of problems, wouldn't it? If our Constitutional government were collecting these taxes, AND it took seriously its obligation to level the playing field in the medical/medicare industry AND realigned the defense/DHS/CIA/ad infinitum budget ratios to the same levels we had at the peak of the Cold War, we'd have a balanced budget without the need to blow up the economy, would we not?

Our mathematical problems are, at their core, political problems.

is there any evidence that libor was manipulated higher?

i thought all the evidence so far is that the manipulation had a downward bias.

Quote:

Just getting my head around this. So they moved the number up to screw every person on the planet. The moves down came on the days it would screw the pension holders? So the needs of the bankers come before the needs of the government workers too. Is that about right?

Besides the temporary trading theft LIBOR manipulation was just an under the covers way of making money for the banks to keep them solvent. This manipulation is part of the broader inflation / ZIRP policy which is the biggest theft ever. Good luck with your pensions in 10-20 years guys! The size of the theft is much worse than stated here.

I'm trying to understand the relationship between LIBOR manipulation and the damages to one side or the other of debt instruments.

As I understand it LIBOR is an index from which a contract to pay (e.g. Mortgage, Commerical Loan, etc.) is pegged. So for a commercial loan I would pay LIBOR + some additional rate each month on my loan. If banks kept LIBOR artificially low wouldn't this hurt banks because they would make less interest? For a fixed mortgage, how would the manipulation hurt except at the time of origination?

I am not saying what was done is not fraudulent, I'm just trying to understand the damages.

Maybe this was the reason Greenspan was touting ARMs.

It is my understanding there are only between 55 million and 60 million mortgages. A minority of them have anything to do with the LIBOR. The number is exaggerated, as banks pay this rate between them. 1 BP on $100K $10 a year, so you have to be talking a whole 1%. Being the TBTF banks are generally borrowers and not lenders in this scheme, I doubt they would put themselves that far on the wrong side of the tracks. That is, unless they were double leveraged or more on the other side of the trade. The ED contract don't move much unless Fed action is anticipated. It is at least connected.

Where LIBOR would get the consumer is most disclosures I have seen dealing with ARM's adjust to the index plus a margin, rate rounded either upward or to the nearest 1/8%. Given a choice between 1.87 and 1.88%, it is clear the apple would be more beneficial to the banks if it fell on the 1.88 side of the fence.

On the derivatives side, we are talking a lot of money. I doubt many big banks are counter parties to each other, as they are all on the short side of the currency. This means they are likely, as a group, ****ing the hedgers on the other side of the swaps trades as a group. As KD has posted, 1 BP might be worth $30 billion a year. This is like the movie there will be blood, where the star tells the preacher about putting his straw in the preachers glass and sucking it dry, implying he slant drilled the property and got all the oil without them knowing. $30 billion here and $30 billion there, a few counter parties might have to resign from the club.

The Suckers have NO ****ing clue what LIBOR is.

I've asked dozens of People:

Bank Tellers don't know.
Car Salesmen don't know.

No One I've asked Who has a mortgage knows.

I'll bet that more People know what a Sasquatch is purported to be than what LIBOR has been purported to be.

You know what the Suckers are going to do about this?

They are going to go vote!

They are going to reach out and pull on a Red! or Blue! lever just as automatically as they reach for their crank when their bladder is full.
-& all that lever pulling will accomplish even less than if they just pulled out their cranks right in the voting booth and*****ed all over this utterly failed concept called Representative Democracy.

They aren't Voters: they ARE Suckers; and from now on that is what I'm gonna call Them when I'm not acting like I give a **** what all of those Suckers think.

LIEBOR

It can be claimed that LIBOR anchored loans whose interest rate was materially impaired by reference to fraudulant rates, are in fact null and void. A contract based on fraudulant figures is usually not considered valid. AND ... possibly a claw back of all payments and a return of the property to the lender could also be argued.

So, if one was upside down on a mortgage, a suit in court to void the contract and petition the court to have payments returned may be an interesting strategy to get one's neck out from under the burden of debt.

And if it catchs on, I'm sure, would collapse the ****ing banks in about 3-6 months.

LIBOR is just another example of some arbitrary half measure that is given universal-constant like status by well indoctrinated progressives. So of course it is manipulable. Otherwise, how cold it be manipulated for "good ends." As it now was. After all, what is good is that which serves the friends of those who get to define what is good; which is always and forever the powerful and well connected.

Anyway, central bank policies have a much larger effect on LIBOR that anything some yahoo at Barclays cold ever hope to. And why is their manipulation somehow any less bad? Because Mickey Mouse accounting using arbitrarily debaseable currency units is currently fashionable? Or perhaps because the public=good, private=bad meme has central to progressive indoctrination for the last 100 years? In saner times and places, independent crooks were considered bad, but crooks operating under the wing of the king were considered even worse.

The "system" is so pill rotten, all the way to the very core, that a nuclear armed Al Qaeda is starting to look like something akin to a salvation. As crazy as that may sound, one of the salient features of the systemic looting racket is that it has to a large extent concentrated the prime looters geographically. By either luck or divine intervention in exactly the places Atta & co. seems to have a fascination for turning into fireballs. So as long as their warhead count is limited, there would likely be a strong enemies-of-my-enemies bias to the whole cleanup. Not that I would ever advocate anything illegal, since doing so is probably illegal and I'm a coward; but it does make me feel somewhat less gloomy about the future.