Like a stampede of wild horses on a dirt highway, daily events in the constant chaos of their unfolding kick up a vast obscuring cloud of dust and smoke. It is not until long afterwards when the dust has settled and the smoke has cleared that an account can be given which measures accurately what went on. Historians patiently wait to correct and amplify what journalists first report.
When long from now the history is written of these times it will show that the biggest story in world affairs was not al Qaeda and terrorism, not the Arab Spring, not the rise of China, not global warming or the melting of Arctic ice, not even the spin-offs from the discovery of the Higgs boson (though that will come close) but, instead, the world-wide financial ruin caused by the greed, incompetence and sheer criminality of unsupervised Big Banking.
Scandal has succeeded scandal. Greed and fraud and wild incompetence have led to vast banking collapses bringing in their train economic disaster in country after country, leading to the misery of hundreds of millions. Meanwhile the perpetrators have continued to award themselves huge bonuses and extravagant golden handshakes. Massive bail-outs paid for by ordinary taxpayers have for a while shored up these utterly corrupted institutions, only to have the cycle of fraud and greed and incompetence and cover-up repeat itself. The richest and most undeserving see their wrongdoing rewarded while the poorest and most vulnerable suffer the consequences. The world is headed straight for a major depression caused by those whom the Economist has recently famously described as international Banksters.
The arrogance and effrontery, as well as the incompetence and criminality, of these charlatans, this gang of thieves, is staggering. They get up and announce multi-billion dollar losses, pocketing their bonuses while leaving behind millions of ruined lives, and nobody marches them off to jail. It is beyond understanding. After each astonishing scandal they proclaim that they have learned their lesson and politicians promise stricter regulation. But nothing better happens.
Surely, however, the latest scandal must lead at last to fundamental change. It is the biggest and most blatant conspiracy of all.
The global interbank lending rate, LIBOR, sets the interest rates of $800 trillion worth of financial instruments around the world ranging from municipal and national bonds to credit card charges and mortgage rates. It turns out that for years this rate was rigged, not set by market forces. A cabal of representatives of some 20 major international banks manipulated the rate to benefit their own banks as much as possible. This they did behind closed doors, beholden to no one.
This has recently come to light in explosive fashion with a major British bank, Barclays, incurring a $400 million fine for abusing the LIBOR system. Barclays is “cooperating” with investigators which means that other banks will surely be found guilty of involvement in this gigantic fraud. The top men at Barclays have had to resign but they have proclaimed their innocence and blamed “rogue traders” lower down in the bank. That is typical of such men – rig the business, rake in huge bonuses while they can get away with it, and blame the little man when they get caught. In this case, however, the scandal dwarfs all previous scandals and scams. Lawless manipulation of rates at this level is poison in a reservoir. Everyone drinks it.
It has become quite evident that international Big Banking is riddled with corruption, greed incompetence and criminality. The terrible thing is that these white collar gangsters are in charge of global financial policy and keeping world-wide banking structures in working order and are doing so in complete secrecy and with a minimum of regulatory oversight. No wonder the world is headed deeper and deeper into unprecedented financial disaster likely to be followed by an economic depression which will shake the world. It is rapidly becoming the biggest story of our times.
