Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

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Keiser Report: GDP Boosters (E437)

With the ECB easing inevitable, periphery yields hit new lows [SoberLook]

As France and Germany PMI measures converge on the rest of the Eurozone and with the area as a whole in a contraction mode, it is becoming increasingly clear that the ECB is likely to ease monetary policy further.

Composite Output PMI (reading below 50 indicates contraction; source: Markit)

Markit: – Activity fell sharply again in both manufacturing and services. While the former saw the steepest rate of decline for four months, the latter saw the downturn ease slightly compared with March.

New business fell for the twenty-first successive month, with the rate of deterioration accelerating for the third month in a row to signal the steepest decline since December. Marked falls were seen in both manufacturing and services.

Some have been hoping that the ECB will follow the Fed, the BOJ, and the BOE into the brave new world of QE on an unprecedented scale. The probability of such action is quite low however because the ECB does not have the dual mandate of the Fed and (for now) is only focused on price stability. The ECB also may hold back on buying periphery debt until/unless the nations request “assistance”.

The incredibly uneven recovery: Net worth of bottom 93 percent declines by $0.6 trillion while top 7 percent net worth increases by $5.6 trillion.

One unique signature of this economic recovery is how narrow it is.  When we look at actual wealth, thenet worth figures of Americans, we see some dismal numbers.  In fact, what we find really isn’t a recovery at all if we look at 93 percent of the country.  Then again, with most of Congress being millionaires they are so far removed from the real lives of the public that reality has become encapsulated in a very tiny bubble.  One piece of data that recently came out highlights this uneven recovery.  From 2009 to 2011, the heart of the so-called recovery, the net worth of Americans went up by $5 trillion.  Sounds great right?  Well, when the data is actually carefully examined we find out that the net worth of the bottom 93 percent of Americans actually fell by $0.6 trillion and the top 7 percent saw all the gains of $5.6 trillion.  In other words, for most Americans, this isn’t a recovery at all.

The uneven recovery

There is more mounting evidence that a modern day Gilded Age is in full effect:

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The Gov’t Has No Solution: 1 In 4 Now Jobless in Spain – Spain’s Jobless Above 6 Million For First Time

Crisis for Europe as trust hits record low [Guardian]

Totalitarian [LewRockwell]

There’s really no other word that would accurately describe the behavior of the many agencies that stormed through Boston and its suburbs this week. Thousands of State and local police, sheriff’s deputies, FBI SWAT employees, Homeland Security Shock Troops, and National Guard soldiers conducted a massive search – virtually none of it in compliance with the 4th Amendment – in search of a single teenager. They practically ordered an entire city “locked down” and were presumably prepared to begin arresting residents who refused to comply with what amounted to martial law.

Now, just for a moment consider what the effective lock down means. As Charles W. Johnson presented the situation on Facebook, lockdown is “from the vocabulary of prison wardens, referring to a condition in which inmates are temporarily completely restricted in their movements and confined to their cells, in order to allow prison guards to conduct searches or contain and control what the inmates are doing.” He then asks these two questions: “If the police have the power to put a city ‘on lockdown,’ then what does that make the city? And what does it make the innocent people living in it?” Well, it would make the city a prisons and the residents would be inmates, naturally.

Now, had the search not ended as early as it did, one question that seems appropriate is, “what about the 3rd Amendment?” Perhaps the least-addressed of all the amendments in the bill of rights, it’s no less relevant to the situation. While it refers specifically to soldiers, little distinction exists in light of these two photographs. The individual on the left is, according to the source, a member of the FBI, who helped in the search. The individual on the right is a soldier in Afghanistan. Note the similarities in the uniform, the equipment, and the weapons. Whatever legal differences exist between the military and civilian law enforcement are at this point irrelevant.

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Media magic: not one angry person in Boston [jonrappoport]

by Jon Rappoport

April 22, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

Shocked? Horrified? Grief-stricken? Determined? Yes, Boston residents who voiced those feelings passed through the media filters and were interviewed on camera.

But angry? Deeply angry at what happened at the Marathon and ready to give vent to it? The screeners took a pass.

I wrote about this subject after the Sandy Hook murders, and it applies to the Aurora massacre as well.

The sober sepulchral tones of media anchors, and their extreme deference to FBI, police, and politicians, form a hypnotic induction for viewers…and these leaders don’t want to break the spell, which is exactly what anger does.

Therefore, it’s a no-go.

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A Visual History Of All Asset Bubbles [Zerohedge]

Maybe not all, but certainly the vast majority of the most popular asset bubbles since before even the Tulip Mania of 1637 (including the Kipper and Wipper currency debasement of the German 30 years War, circa 1621, which is appropriately enough deja vu in contemporary retrospect, only the war is missing). 

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Meet the Disastrous “Internet Sales Tax” Bill Congress is Trying to Sneak Through [libertyblitzkrieg]

Congress sure is hard at work at the moment trying to pass one horrific bill after the other. With the disastrous CISPA, aka the “Patriot Act for the Internet,”rightfully getting most of the attention since it represents such a treasonous attack on civil liberties (it passed the House of Representatives last week and now moves on to the Senate), another awful bill is also moving forward that we must all be aware of and fight hard against.  I am referring to S. 743, or the Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA), colloquially known as the “internet or online sales tax bill.” While it is being sold by its sponsors and the Obama Administration as helping brick and mortar mom and pop retailers level the playing field with online retailers, what it actually does in practice is create a bureaucratic tax nightmare and could be the final nail in the coffin for the U.S. economy.  But don’t take my word for it…

A bipartisan group of Senators have written a letter to Harry Reid expressing not only their concerns with the bill, but also outrage at the fact that he is trying to sneak it through without normal committee process.

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Here It Comes: Internet Sales Taxes? [market-ticker]

Never let a crisis go to waste.

Let’s add to that: Consume the idiots on the ‘Net with tinfoil crap about false flags while you find a way to rob them, and you’ve really accomplished something.

Guess what — you’re about to get rammed — again.

As early as Monday, the Senate will vote on a bill that was introduced only last Tuesday. The text of this legislation, which would fundamentally change interstate commerce, only became available on the Library of Congress website over the weekend. And you thought ObamaCare was jammed through Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic House in a hurry.

This is Enzi’s “Marketplace Fairness Act”, and would impose a 50-state and audit liability requirement on all web-based businesses that don’t qualify for the “small business” exemption (US $1 million in sales.)

This is an attempt to get around the Quill decision that made such attempts to impose tax liability on entities not in a given state unlawful.  Quill essentially set a demarcation line — as a merchant with no offices or people in a given state you had no obligation to comply with the demands of that state.

This is an inherent part of a federalist system of government — there are 50 state laboratories for what works and that doesn’t, including different systems of taxation and spending.  Those who approve of one particular state’s handling of such things can move themselves (and their business interests) there, while those who disagree can move away.

Enzi’s proposal, along with other similar ones and this “sneak it in the back door” game, would in fact discriminate against online retailers.  Those retailers in a given state with no sales tax don’t have to inquire or document where their customers come from — you can drive across the border, buy something and drive back.

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