RollingStone | "It's a double conspiracy," says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a
former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of
Maryland. "It's the height of criminality."
The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it
also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the
Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were
spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of
collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. "Given the clubby
manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other
benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry," CFTC
Commissioner Bart Chilton said.
But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of
March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been
so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against
the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a
federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If
cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor
manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were
competing in the first place.
"A farce," was one antitrust lawyer's response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.
"Incredible," says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases. All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These
banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their
financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of
them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets
equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize
the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that
would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's
increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil
courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught
working together to game the system.
If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised,
real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities
like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself,
can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are
doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real
thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want. Fist tap Arnach.
