What the hell is LIBOR and why should we care?

Libor, libor, libor. I've read about it so much online yet can't seem to understand why it's been ignored discussion in the mainstream media. More importantly, does it have as big of implications as being discussed?



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Originally Posted by FORBES: This New Libor 'Scandal' Will Cause A Terrifying Financial Crisis ... Two years ago, a major scandal rocked the world after it was revealed that big international banks had long been manipulating the Libor interest rates to fraudulently boost their profits. As outrageous as the Libor rate-fixing scandal was, it pales in comparison to another Libor “scandal” that is occurring at this very moment, but has received virtually none of the attention that it rightfully deserves. The ultimate fallout of this much larger, little-known Libor “scandal” will be nothing less than an international financial crisis. ... Amid all of the attention that the Libor rate-fixing scandal has received, the world is completely overlooking a far worse Libor “scandal” that has been occurring right under our noses this entire time. Though the Libor rate-fixing scandal is certainly no trivial matter, the losses caused by it amount to a few tens of billions of dollars, which is ultimately a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the global economy and financial system. In addition, as dramatic as the term “rate-fixing” sounds, the Libor manipulations only moved the Libor rate by a few basis points (basis points are .01 percentage points) for just a few brief moments at a time. The Libor manipulations did not move the rate by significant magnitudes such as from 5 percent to 2 percent, for example. The vastly worse Libor “scandal” that I am referring to is the fact that the Libor has stayed at record low levels for the past half-decade, which is helping to fuel a massive economic bubble around the entire world that will end in a devastating financial crisis that will be even worse than the Global Financial Crisis. Instead of causing a few tens of billions of dollars worth of losses like the Libor rate-fixing scandal, the “Libor Bubble” will gut the global economy by trillions of dollars.

Previous reports



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Originally Posted by Rolling Stone: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever 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. ... All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system. ... Two of America's top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it's dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to "collateral consequences" in the economy.

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Holy hell! Sounds like a big deal no one is talking about! Banks ARE above the law!

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