Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
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Regular, normal, middle class working Americans can write a bad check for $20 and be arrested. Steal a loaf of bread and the police will pursue you through neighborhoods with dogs and helicopters. Criminally manipulate trillions (conspiracy, falsification of official financial statements, fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, how many more do you want and I'm not even a lawyer) and you can buy islands, jets, Congressmen, and laugh at those who try to stop you. Where's the goof who said "the system is working"? Where is our Attorney General? I KNOW he's not busy trying to find out how the President of the United States came to be using the Social Security number of a dead man from Connecticutt and he's never even lived there one day?! You or I do that? You couldn't afford the lawyer needed to get you out of THAT.....where IS "the system is working" clown?
ReplyDeleteNow that the conservative and liberal media agree on something, what is to be done?
ReplyDeleteOf course we're right. Now to wake up as many friends and family as possible.
ReplyDeleteRalph Nader calls it a "two-tiered justice system." I know he has his detractors, but he's right about how the elite (not always synonymous with the rich) are often immune from the consequences and results of their actions.
ReplyDeleteHere's Nader's quote, "If it turns out that the West, Texas explosion is the result of a "terrorist act," expect federal law enforcement officials and the mass media to fly to Texas from Boston. But until then, don't expect much.
ReplyDeleteOne reason -- our two tier criminal justice system. One tier for individuals. Another for corporations." - Ralph Nader
This guy reads GLP, I should have made myself go out and vote.
ReplyDeleteWatch for the FOX
ReplyDelete