Are oil price benchmarks rigged just like LIBOR?

GATA Total Warns over ‘Inaccurate’ Benchmarks By Javier Blas Financial Times, London Monday, October 8, 2012 http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3c859a3c-1163-11e2-a637-00144feabdc0.html One of the world’s largest oil trading groups has warned of “inaccurate pricing” in the benchmarks for the energy market that underpin billions of dollars of trading each day in contracts such as Brent and West Texas Intermediate. [...]

Douglas Keenan: My thwarted attempt to tell of LIBOR shenanigans

GATA By Douglas Keenan Financial Times, London Thursday, July 26, 2012 http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/dc5f49c2-d67b-11e1-ba60-00144feabdc0.html In 1991, I began trading for Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, in London. I was trading bonds, derivatives, and related securities. One of those securities was based on the three-month Libor rate: the interest rate at which banks can borrow money for three [...]

At least three banks seen central to LIBOR rigging

GATA By Carrick Mollenkamp and Emily Flitter Reuters Saturday, July 28, 2012 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/28/us-banking-libor-traders-idUSB… New details from court documents and sources close to the Libor scandal investigation suggest that groups of traders working at three major European banks were heavily involved in rigging global benchmark interest rates. Some of those traders, including one who used to [...]

Paul Craig Roberts and Nomi Prins: The real LIBOR scandal

GATA 7a ET Monday, July 16, 2012 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Former Assistant U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts and financial analyst Nomi Prins argue that the manipulation of the LIBOR interest rate by big banks was meant to support government bond prices that in a free market would fall amid so much [...]

Fed knew of LIBOR issue in 2007-08, proposed reforms

GATA By Carrick Mollenkamp Reuters Tuesday, July 10, 2012 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/10/us-markets-credit-barclays-idU… The Federal Reserve Bank of New York may have known as early as August 2007 that the setting of global benchmark interest rates was flawed. Following an inquiry with British banking group Barclays Plc in the spring of 2008, it shared proposals for reform of [...]

Alasdair Macleod: LIBOR fixing implicates government as well

GATA 10:08a HKT Sunday, July 8, 2012 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: The LIBOR rate-rigging scandal, economist Alasdair Macleod writes at GoldMoney, is more evidence of the merger of banking and government, “a devil’s pact, with state interests being traded for benefits for the banks. The state has been funded, and the banks have [...]

LIBOR manipulation probe turns criminal in U.S., Reuters says

GATA By Carrick Mollenkamp Reuters Tuesday, February 28, 2012 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/28/us-libor-probe-idUSTRE81R1ZG20… NEW YORK — The Justice Department is conducting a criminal probe into whether the world’s biggest banks manipulated a global benchmark rate that is at the heart of a wide range of loans and derivatives, from trillions of dollars of mortgages and bonds to interest [...]