Hat tip to Book Lady's Ghost at Spengler Board.....
About Bankster Rate manipulation being perhaps even "good".......
Dr Frankenstein's LIBORatory
By Spengler
The US Justice Department plans to bring criminal charges against banks for manipulating the benchmark rate for US dollar money markets, the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). It would be the first prosecution of financial institutions for having charged their customers less rather than more, and having taken less rather than more income.
That's right: rigging LIBOR transferred income away from the banks to their debtors. There is a case for a civil suit by shareholders for income lost to the banks' largesse, but hardly a criminal case.
Attorney General Eric Holder, the man who arranged former US president Bill Clinton's pardon of fugitive tax cheat Marc Rich, fresh from condemnation for contempt of Congress by the House
of Representatives, is shocked - shocked - to find that interest rates went misreported at the peak of the financial panic of 2008. Criminalizing the kind of rule-bending that the regulators sanctioned during a crisis is sadly typical of the Barack Obama administration's operating procedure.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Eco ... 7Dj02.html
No problems with holding against Holder but this is startling even if it may be true..........
Reminds me of the story of the knight who was able to slay the dragon because he thought his sword was magical when it wasn't...........The lies did the trick. The truth won't set you free; the truth will make you broke. The regulators did this before, in 1982, when the bankruptcy of some big emerging market debtors ruined the solvency of big American banks that had lent them too much, and again in 1990, when a real estate market collapse left a number of institutions (notably Citibank) in technical insolvency. That's what regulators are supposed to do. If you want Inspector Javert to run the Federal Reserve, prepare to be very, very poor.
But where to you draw the line with that sword..........