Labour’s Dirty Finger Prints All Over Bank of England LIBOR Manipulation Crime Scene
By: Nadeem Walayat
Market Oracle
Jul 04, 2012
The mainstream press has been busy during the past 2 days working itself up into a frenzy of reporting, despite the fact that they are in effect reporting a 4 YEAR old story, something that I have touched on many, many times over the years that LIBOR rates are MANIPULATED by ALL parties concerned as a consequence of a series of credit crisis earth quakes that took place following the collapse of Northern Rock (a year before Lehman’s), as fear driven Labour government politicians put pressure on a Panicking and Incompetent Bank of England to loosened the reins on the bankrupting, insolvent banks who took the increasingly nervous nods, winks and nudges as a licence to defraud counter parties to interest rate derivatives contracts (usually other banks). Now four years later the mainstream press is using a magnifying glass on just one aspect of market manipulation that took place during the financial crisis that ultimately leads all the way to Alistair Darling’s and Gordon Brown’s Downing Street doors.
Today’s mainstream press commentary is increasingly concentrating itself on statements that first started emerging in the mainstream press on late Sunday 1st July via Robert Preston of the BBC.
In making false submissions about their borrowing costs, managers at Barclays believed they were operating under an instruction from Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England, I have learned.
This belief was fostered after a telephone conversation in the autumn of 2008 between Mr Tucker and Bob Diamond, who at the time ran Barclays’ investment bank, Barclays Capital, and is today chief executive of Barclays.
In finding Barclays guilty of attempting to manipulate the important LIBOR borrowing rate, the benchmark rate for bank-to-bank lending, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) made an elliptical reference to this conversation.
The relevant passage from the FSA’s judgement against Barclays talks of a “telephone conversation between a senior individual at Barclays and the Bank of England during which the external perceptions of Barclays’ LIBOR submissions were discussed”.
I have established that the conversation was between Mr Diamond and Mr Tucker, who is a leading candidate to succeed Sir Mervyn King as governor of the Bank of England.
The Rest…HERE
