Spiegel: The LIBOR Cartel is an ‘Organized Fraud’

Spiegel has released an EPIC report on the escalating LIBOR scandal, calling the manipulation an ‘organized fraud’- i.e. A MANIPULATIVE BANKING CARTEL!
The difference between a few Barclay’s traders submitting a few false LIBOR rates, and an organized cartel fraud ring is gargantuan.
We continue to state that the tsunami continues to build, and will wash ashore onto US banks (likely BOA and JPM) in the coming weeks.

There have been plenty of banking scandals, but none quite like this: Investigators and political leaders believe that the manipulation of the Libor benchmark interest rate was the result of organized fraud. Institutions that participated could face billions in fines and penalties.

Deutsche Bank and more than a dozen other financial giants have come under sharp criticism due to the alleged manipulation of the Libor ( London Interbank Offered Rate), a benchmark interest rate. Some are even referring to the banks that are instrumental in calculating that rate a cartel, the sort of vocabulary not normally associated with the financial industry.

Regulators are using terms like “organized fraud.” European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has suggested that bankers ought to be called “banksters.” But in the case of some agencies, especially in New York and London, the outcry is also convenient; it diverts attention away from their own failures. For years, regulators overlooked what was happening right in front of their eyes.

Now that the authorities have woken up, they are aggressively pursuing the offenders — and are reaching all the way up to the boardrooms. More than half a dozen government agencies, from Canada to Japan, are investigating the case.

German authorities are also involved. A dozen employees of Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, have paid several visits to Deutsche Bank in recent weeks. They work for BaFin, the German federal financial supervisory authority, which has ordered a special audit, and are poking around the bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt, traveling to London, where its money market traders are based, and flying to Tokyo. Even the bank’s two new co-CEOs, Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen, are expected to sit down for a question and answer session with the auditors. This is particularly unpleasant for Jain, who, as head of the investment banking division during the period in question, was ultimately responsible for money market transactions.
Read more: