Speakeasy forum: How many, and which US Banks are involved in LIBOR?

Just knock down the stack of 12 milk bottles to reveal the names of the banks , and the shackles connecting any or all of them to the Obama White House. I'm looking for the names of all 12 banks and a clear link to any Obama official before July 2008 when Obama was briefed either truthfully or not on this scandal.

I've done most of the heavy lifting already. Credit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, UBS, HSBC, Barclays, Citigroup, and Hoare and Company, that's 7 out of 12. Just 5 more to go

In another thread you thought crime statistics should be separated by race.

WHITE collar crime....White-collar crime is a financially motivated, nonviolent crime committed for illegal monetary gain. Within the field of criminology, white-collar crime initially was defined by sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation".

NO guns or violence...the victim is still a victim, perhaps more of a victim...many have more in the bank than they carry in their pocket.

the revelling in naming Bernanke, and Geithner and Goldman Sachs, and Lehman Brothers and an endless river of other such names is suggestive.

But none of this answers a simple question. Which Banks comprise LIBOR?

but he's had time to do something about it.....including investigating or firing Geithner....and instead, he was defending him even before this broke.

"The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2011 that regulators were focusing on Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and UBS AG in their probe of Libor rate manipulation." And the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Still 3 missing

Rob

Titanic banks hit Libor 'berg

and let the "free" market rule.

Diana

wouldn't be needed if the paid watchdogs that are already in place, like Geithner, Frank, Dodd, etc. would do what they get paid to do....watch and report immediately instead of warning the bad apples that they need to 'fix' it quickly or give some song and dance act publicly that everything is 'fine' when they know already it not only isn't, but that the house of cards is tumbling down.

IF something could be fixed quickly...it would have been done quickly between June 2007 and Jan 2009

18 months?...you should be able to do something "quickly" in 18 months.

That is UNLESS you didn't want it to happen during an election campaign.

When you have some sort of an election every 2 years...What politician, in their right mind, would want any sort of bad news.

>>>>"The documents show that in early 2008 a memo written by then New York Fed President Tim Geithner to Bank of England chief Mervyn King looked into ways to "fix" Libor. [RTB fix = repair][17][18] While the released memos suggest that the New York Fed helped to identify problems related to Libor and press the relevant authorities in the UK to reform, there is no documentation that shows any evidence that Geithner's recommendations were acted upon or that the Fed tried to make sure that they were. In October 2008, several months after Geithner's memo to King, a Barclays employee told a New York Fed representative that Libor rates were still "absolute rubbish." "

RTB text and opinions start here:
So Geithner is likely to have known in 2007, he was concerned, he was attempting to help the Bank of England repair this situation, there is no indication that The Bank of England or The British Bankers Association took any effective action.

Geithner is as aware as any banker is that bad news creates havoc, market crashes and bank crashes, and chose to keep the lid on the issue, but he still attempted to help LIBOR repair itself. Unfortunately either LIBOR, or its constituent banks or the British Bankers Association or the Bank of England, or some combination of those elements could not agree, and continued to screw around with the rate.

Geithner is in no way linked in a fiduciary or legal sense to LIBOR. It is not his responsibility to detonate the bomb, nor is it in his, or anybody's best interest for there to be yet another financial scandal or explosion. All of this rate fixing helped lower the cost of the bailout.>>>

Geithner CHOSE TO KEEP THE LID ON IT while attempting to help LIBOR repair itself. Why? Because "all of this rate fixing helped lower the cost of the bailout"............ Key date here appears to be October 2008 as the last memo....a year after Geithner knew about it and his 'recommendations' weren't acted upon. It also appears that even after Oct 2008, nothing was being done again, while everything was crashing down quickly....nothing at least until two months before Bush left office and the bailout was signed.

introduced a new number. I had read that it was 12 banks which participate in setting LIBOR rates, this article says 16 which means Wikipedia and all the newspaper articles are wrong, and I need 7 more Banks not just 3.

Unfortunately nowhere does it say that JPMorganChase or Wells Fargo are part of the LIBOR deLIBORations.

How about it? Shall we call this whole schemozzle the DeLIBORation Scandal. And in testimony, "Mr, XYZ deLIBORed in his testimony that he was not involved in the DeLIBORation Scandal.

I mean what's a Bank scandal if you can't have a little fun with it. Remember the party thrown with TARP funds?

Rob

best answer I've been able to find regarding Geithner's complicity.

"The New York Federal Reserve in July 2012, released documents dating back to 2007 which showed that they were aware that banks were lying about their borrowing costs when setting Libor and chose to take no action against them at that time.[13][14] Released minutes from the Bank of England indicated similarly that the bank and its deputy governor Paul Tucker were also aware as early as November 2007 of industry concerns that the Libor rate was being underreported.[15][16] In one 2008 document a Barclays employee told a New York Fed analyst, "We know that we're not posting um, an honest LIBOR, and yet we are doing it, because, um, if we didn't do it, it draws, um, unwanted attention on ourselves."[14] [Note that he is a Barclays employee, not the NYFedReserve.]

"The documents show that in early 2008 a memo written by then New York Fed President Tim Geithner to Bank of England chief Mervyn King looked into ways to "fix" Libor. [RTB fix = repair][17][18] While the released memos suggest that the New York Fed helped to identify problems related to Libor and press the relevant authorities in the UK to reform, there is no documentation that shows any evidence that Geithner's recommendations were acted upon or that the Fed tried to make sure that they were. In October 2008, several months after Geithner's memo to King, a Barclays employee told a New York Fed representative that Libor rates were still "absolute rubbish." "

RTB text and opinions start here:
So Geithner is likely to have known in 2007, he was concerned, he was attempting to help the Bank of England repair this situation, there is no indication that The Bank of England or The British Bankers Association took any effective action.

Geithner is as aware as any banker is that bad news creates havoc, market crashes and bank crashes, and chose to keep the lid on the issue, but he still attempted to help LIBOR repair itself. Unfortunately either LIBOR, or its constituent banks or the British Bankers Association or the Bank of England, or some combination of those elements could not agree, and continued to screw around with the rate.

Geithner is in no way linked in a fiduciary or legal sense to LIBOR. It is not his responsibility to detonate the bomb, nor is it in his, or anybody's best interest for there to be yet another financial scandal or explosion. All of this rate fixing helped lower the cost of the bailout.

So may we please have an end to this farrago of lies, half-truths and innuendoes in an area that few of us understand and fewer of us care about. So long as it didn't reach into your pocket (and low rates don't) which it couldn't because it was purely about hypothetical bank to bank lending the only people harmed are stock holders for the various banks. That doesn't keep me up at night.

Your only concern here is to destabilize Obama's Cabinet and to try to lose him votes. Fine, we got that sometime back in 2008, early. It's 4 years later. There's nothing to see here, there is no malfeasance, or misfeasance, or duty to report, or anything. This whole thing is not just tissue paper, it is tissue paper still in its gooey liquid form, nothing connects with anything, nothing holds together.

This is an ex-issue, bereft of life, it is no more. If you didn't keep nailing it to a placard 4 times a day it would have rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It should have been pushing up the daisies 4 years ago. Now, if that's all, do you have anything else? Like a Slug? or a Snail or some other slime creature?

Rob

Mark?

Remember Rob... you are asking people who have spent 4 years demanding an "official" official birth certificate to be reasonable, and admit that there is no reason to link a European bank scandal to the POTUS.

You are not going to get it.

we let Toni off the hook, we'll be inundated with more of her pre-written Tea Party talking points, and all the threads will become ludicrous swamps of fiction, sliming, and changing the question to something else than was asked.

If just one person can hold another person to account for the pre-scripted off the point responses and doesn't let go, then the person posting these pre-written partisan screeds will eventually be seen for the political agent they appear to be. Not an independent voice, but judging as i said before, from the Cut and Paste, same text, same font, off point rambling, they will eventually be recognized as someone advocating a point of view here for compensation, which is surely a violation of the Terms of Service.

I see no difference between posting Political advertisements than posting advertisements for a Product. I'm not a paid Democrat, I don't even belong to the party since I'm 45 miles due north of the border, and need a boat to get there, or a 130 mile drive.

Now I don't know what Toni's connection is with the source of the boiler-plate "quotations" that she posts with such relish. What I do know is that she could just as easily be a computer program which scans SE, finds a key word and posts the same reply in every thread it comes to. It's certainly beginning to look like that.

When, in a debate, people get mired in side issues, the response is "Call the Question" which means debate stops and the question is voted on. The Question here is which banks are part of Midol, sorry, Libor, and is Geithner connected in any way to any of them. So far the answer is a resounding NO, there is NO CONNECTION between Geithner and any of the participants in LIBOR. So Toni, unless you have clear irrefutable evidence indicating Geithner worked for one of those Banks during the period at issue, you need not post again.

Rob

Toni is entitled to her opinions. I question some of her fact finding, and I am happy to engage in a spirited debate with her upon occasion.

The truth is that what she thinks, or what I think, or what you think... doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the larger picture. We are just a Koffee Klatch on SE, kicking around ideas. If I come here and learn something about anything, then it was a good day. If a comment made me curious enough to look something up in order to prove or disprove another's remark, then I am so much the better for the effort.

I try not to take anything personal. Most of the people who used to go for the throat with personal insults and would scour the net for personal information to use against a person are not here any more. Toni is a person who you may disagree with, but hey, at least she isn't out to ruin anyone like some other previous members of SE have tried to do to those they disagreed with.

had a responsibility to OUR country to notify the Fed Reserve in DC OR the Financial head (Dodd/Frank) of what he found? Instead, you believe he had a responsibility to the UK to tell them to 'fix' the Libor rate? And I use your quotes around 'fix', cause that could mean just about anything from actually repairing it to covering it up as quickly as possible.

both of them, after blaming the Jews, feel nothing should have been done on our side to correct for the bogus LIBOR rates, other than just make a note of it and hope someone else fixed it, while it continued to hold sway over a large number of world banks. Considering some of the things the Obama administration has actually done, maybe not doing something about a problem is actually an improvement?

First, I'm non-religious. My father was a lapsed Presbyterian, my mother a lapsed Methodist. I was remarking on the fascination which a number of people including yourself on occasion have for mentioning Jewish connections.

In no way did I blame jews, or Jews, or the Jewish people. I was just remarking on the heavy handed use by some of what are clearly Ashkenazic Names.

And given his position before January 2009, no I don't think he had any duty to report. However, I am quite sure that this situation was well known in the Banking community long before 2007. Surprisingly, people who run banks are not stupid. They can look at a Spreadsheet or 126 of them and go, "This is peculiar." The banking community knew what was going on, but they kept it quiet, because that's what bankers do. You do not ruffle the waters for fear of the storm that may erupt.

Please show me where the false numbers generated by LIBOR harmed the United States in any way. They kept the rates low and stable when they might have risen, cost the US more in borrowing, and caused major crises. Now we got the crisis, but not from London, but from Wall Street. You say Geithner was protecting London. I say Wall Street looted the wallets of every man woman and child and fetus in the United States for a decade or more. LIBOR is nothing, it is a tempest in a tea-cup (that, by the way, is the proper phrase, where's the threat from a tempest in a tea pot, except for those at the spout end?)

So, a tempest in a tea-cup, who would be harmed? A few bankers would go down for collusion. Would it harm individuals? Probably not since the banks were deliberately colluding to keep the rates low and stable.

Wall Street, on the other hand, should have been taken apart. Masses of CEO's and CFO's and COO's and Traders and Management of Investment firms should have gone to Sing Sing if there were justice in this world, never to re-emerge. Certainly nobody should have had a bonus for a decade or two, nor should there have been parties. Obama didn't have the wisdom of FDR, though I don't remember a lot of people going to jail in 1933. Of course I was then -13 1/2 years old, so my memory of the period is hazy.

If there is one thing I will hold against Obama to my dying day it was that he muffed the ball on the Wall Street Crash aftermath. He did brilliantly in averting another Crash, but there should have been consequences for those who caused the near "Crash" and there should have been ongoing penalties for those in the money business for engineering it in the first place. That's why there should be no bonuses. In fact, I don't think bonuses should be paid until 5 years have elapsed, and nothing has gone wrong with the Trades, Swaps, IPO's etc. etc. That way Bankers and Investment houses will be encouraged to take the LONG VIEW, rather than to grab the money and run.

So, do the two of you understand. I was not singling out a jew or any jews, I was singling out those who use their names as if they are battering rams to prove an already ludicrous case. And Geithner didn't have a duty to report what was already common knowledge, and a non-threat to the US. As noted, it probably saved the US and US individuals money in the long run.

Rob

accounts that were earning interest were hurt because the interest rates were so low.

Diana

I thought of that a day or two ago, got busy and forgot to post that information

That's one of the things I was yelling about Greenspan some years ago. He also precipitated this by suddenly clamping down when he claimed "inflation". Turns out he was looking at "wage inflation", aka more spending money for workers. In doing so he created a strong divergence between prices and wages that began this recession and has worsened since that time.