Looking at the report on Barclays it seems it referred to rate rigging between January 2005 and July 2008. So, before the alleged conversation. So, no defence on that score. So, one wonders whether the report itself was rigged to avoid implicating politicians / senior civil servants? Let's hope the truth outs and all implicated bankers face the full force of the law, repay all previous earnings and maybe get extradited to the USA. Let's hope that if any politicians colluded or influenced the alleged rigging they too get extradited.

I just hope tomorrow is explosive (metaphorically).

4th of July, bound to be fireworks

This gent sums up things well, in my opinion: www.standard.co.uk/business/mark ... rnalSearch

This gent sums up things well, in my opinion: www.standard.co.uk/business/mark ... rnalSearch

Thnking about the LIBOR enquiry again, who better to enquire into the dodgy dealings than those past-masters on lying, cheating and fiddling - our MPs?

It's a desperate defence, he's trying to implicate politicians and hope that they'll back off.
Despite the hysterical and typically biased article in The Sun (the one posted in the NHS thread) and others, all that I can see is that someone from the BoE (which is independent) and someone from Whitehall asked Barclay's why they were at the top end of the LIBOR rates.
How there is a leap from that to telling or sanctioning Barclays to artificially fix the rate is beyond me.

The way LIBOR is set is also interesting.

16 banks are consulted and the top and bottom four are discounted before the middle eight are consolidated. To have any real effect, there would need to be collusion on a grand scale.

Yes, but not as far as why they would actually [ido[/i the fraud, even if they believed the BoE had [isanctioned [/ithe fraud, is beyond me.

For me, this calls into question the myth of the omnipotent CEO: the 'top talent' who therefore command the top salaries. Bob Diamond has just said he knew nothing of the LIBOR fiddle. Let's suppose that's true. If Barclays made huge profits because of this fiddle, [ihe[/i would reap the rewards in terms of salary and bonus. But he knew nothing about it. It was nothing to do with him. This accords with my own experience from the days when I was a wage slave: many of the things which led to reduced costs/increased income were due to the efforts of people throughout the company, not just the CEO. And yet it's the CEO who gets the big pay. Time for limits on executive pay, methinks.

Someone's been busy making some stickers for Boris's Bikes:

I've long maintained the same - 100 x the lowest paid seems about fair.

The when it comes to executive bonuses, that should apply across the board too. So if the CEO is paid £1m and receives a bonus of £5m then everyone in the company should receive a bonus of 5 x their annual salary.

When you add to this the shambles at Nat West last few weeks the CEO's seem to have very little control over the actual [irunning[/i of the bank. They seem powerless and in effect have delegated the running of the bank to lower down managers as they claim to be in the dark over most things. If that is so then I don't see how they deserve the vast salaries anyway. In Diamond's case he couldn't even engender a suitable culture at the bank that would have stopped his employees from even thinking about rigging the rate. That is definitely CEO territory.

I think you are spot on about the money earned by the bank being down to its employees rather than the CEO. The trouble is the bonus culture spreads a long way down with even ordinary employees having some element of their wages made up from bonuses. This is a very American way of doing it. If the employee doesn't meet targets the wage bill is less and if they do, then the bank makes more money. This ignores the old fashioned way of doing business where people didn't cut corners to make a bonus and some staff in the regulatory areas of the bank would have seen it as their duty to put the brakes on sharp practice even if that did mean less profit for the bank. You worked hard for your salary but you did the job right.

I also found it really interesting that the rate rigging was done via email exchanges. I am sure in the past before IT systems allowed this easy communication the paths of the people setting the Libor rate and the traders never crossed. A Chinese Wall would have existed between these two sets of people as they just never met. It seems to me no one thought that it might not be a good idea for these two groups to be in such easy communication and preventing that sort of thing should have been put in place by Diamond.

I have worked in banks as a software supplier for years and they were always extremely keen on a proper division of labour in that those involved in IT security and the like were distinctly different groups and staff were often swapped in and out regularly so as not to become too familiar with the systems to prevent any abuse. It seems that sort of culture has gone.

From some of the accounts it seems that yesterday was a missed opportunity by the Select Committee. Lack of a coordinated approach to the questioning, allowing Diamond Geezer to be far too chummy (and complaining about it on Twitter and not to his face FFS). The story seems to be about how he feels terrible about it all and not how, as CEO he was ultimately responsible.

If anything it adds strength to the call for a judge led inquiry rather than a parliamentary one. MPs had an open goal and did a Geoff Thomas.

This is the best and worst example of the sort of cover-up and blatant whitewash that the top toffs now KNOW they can cobble together and get away with. It stinks, but get away with it they have, and will. The fuss will die away and all will carry on as before.

Why did nobody at the Committee have the ability and wit to ask and press the key, and fookin obvious, questions? Even the chair, Tyrie, is whingeing afterwards that Diamond didn't really say anything, well, why didn't you ask him anything?

Tucker at the BoE apparently told Diamond that "it did not always need to be the case that we appeared as high as we have recently". Come again? Why did Diamond not say: "Eh? WTF you on about, Paul? Barclays historical rates do not have "needs". They are just rates. What they are is a fact, and to say they don't always need to appear high is thus directly implying artificial misrepresentation of those rates. If anyone else can advance an explanation of what Tucker could have been hinting at which makes sense, please do.

Del Messier, to whom it was passed on, understood the clear implication. But it wasn't Bob's fault because he did not understand it the same way! So it's just a simple 'mistake' then! And not Bob's fault at all!

Having received and acted upon implementing this almost direct incitement to falsify rates, the submitters (who state the rates) "vigorously resist". The submitter raises this with the compliance office and is told by compliance to stick to the rules. Compliance say they will raise it with senior management but they never do so. So there is the second watershed. The first is the BoE never said or implied that the rate should be fixed, and Diamond didn't at all think they did, but the person he passed the meassage to did, and so the whole thing came about as a result of a simple misunderstanding. Nobody asked why Barclays would commit fraud so lightly, just because of a hint in a summary of a conversation.

The second watershed is that the submitters did refuse and seek specific guidance, were told to stay legal, and compliance would raise the issue of the submitters being instructed to commit major world-class financial fraud with senior management, "but they never do so". WTfookinF? So what happened? Did compiance forget? But of course, as conveniently nobody in compliance brought the "anomaly" to the attention of "senior management" then very conveniently, you can't blame senior management for it.

Nobody explains why the submitters did not press the matter when they heard nothing from compliance. Nobody explains why, if indeed they were told to "stick to the rules", the submitters who were so aghast at the instruction to fake rates, seemingly nevertheless went ahead and faked them, despite not hearing any further.

And all that is before we have Tucker who will no doubt come along and draw the final veil of smoke and mirrors over the affair, so we can all accept that it was just one of those things.

[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18714083Paul Mason on the BBC website[/url sets out some of the most stinking and disgusting anomalies and exposes many of the warts in this evidence, and fundamental shortcomings in the "investigations" and "inquiries", but this is no more effective than me posting this on here. A few people with the wit to get their heads around it will nod and spit, but there is nothing anyone can do about it, there will be no arrests, no prosecutions, and so the whole interlude is just a monumental waste of time and money. *


*[size=85 I don't exclude the usual possibilty of some junior patsy being sacrificed, but certainly all the big players are immune to anything.[/size

If the US government was not complicit (and I have no reason to think they were) then I think there will be trials.

Those claiming we do not have a 'casino economy' seem to have gone quiet.

Now might be a good time for Diamond to relinquish his US citizenship

I used to work for a major bank and I can assure you that this sort of manipulation has been going on for decades. Nothing to do with modern tech.

There's an interesting article in [url=http://www.economist.com/node/21558281The Economist[/url (no not the one with Osborne's j'accuse moment), that suggests LIBOR fixing went back as far as the late 80s.

[iThe FSA has identified price-rigging dating back to 2005, yet some current and former traders say that problems go back much further than that. “Fifteen years ago the word was that LIBOR was being rigged,” says one industry veteran closely involved in the LIBOR process. “It was one of those well kept secrets, but the regulator was asleep, the Bank of England didn’t care and…[the banks participating were happy with the reference prices.” Says another: “Going back to the late 1980s, when I was a trader, you saw some pretty odd fixings…With traders, if you don’t actually nail it down, they’ll steal it.”[/i

If true, this could well blow up in the tories' faces

This is why Labour want a judge led inquiry, to get the whole picture. I do find it strange that Osbourne seems to accuse pretty much the entire Labour treasury staff of being complicit and knowing what was going on at Barclays, yet we're supposed to believe that the guy who ran the department at Barclays at the time didn't have a clue.

Interesting to see Osbourne following the current Tory strategy of hurling personal insults at Labour politicians yesterday. I guess that's all they've got. I couldn't go into politics, I'd have ted him if I'd been Ed Balls. Then, a raging for no real reason, Kirsty Walk actually asked Milliband what his father would make of the situation at the end of an interview on Newsnight, at this point I would have told her to go f*** herself.
No, politics ain't for me. I don't know how these people can accomplish anything. Battle of the bullies.

[i100[/i times the lowest paid? Bloody hell, you're generous. The [url=http://www.ecology.co.uk/Ecology Building Society[/url have gone for 6 (or 8, something like that).

Contrary to what some may believe, I've never had a problem with anyone making money and if the CEO of a UK-based major company wants to pay his cleaners no more than £10k, I haven't got a problem with him earning £1m. However, if he decides to outsource his cleaning and the cleaners then end up working for a contractor on £6k a year, the CEO's pay drops to £600k

Well I am talking the mid-eighties but fair enough.

I was working for software suppliers and whenever I was on-site and given access to computer systems it was almost necessary to sign in blood. Likewise passwords were delivered in sealed envelopes and those responsible for the hardware security devices (the things that do stuff like PIN translation and verify MAC's) took their jobs very seriously. Banks were a ideal place for a certain type of person to work in IT. We had one chap leave out company to work for Lloyds and as a developer he was awful. He found his niche at the bank being very fastidious and so on. Hot on procedure, rubbish at producing anything.

As to technology making things like this easier to do I still think there is something in it. It is much easier to ask someone to do something wrong in a faceless email rather than face to face.

Get yourself down to the enquiry then and give evidence.

[url=http://www.standard.co.uk/business/business-news/rich-ricci-in-tears-on-dealing-floor-sfo-launches-probe-7920328.htmlNot as tough as they seem[/url

Rich Ricci sheds tears on the trading floor and SFO finally gets what's happening and launches a "probe"