Well I'm sure glad I read this blog. I'd have never known. :-)

Nothing to see here folks...please move along...
American Idol! Football! Dancing with the Stars! celeb divorces...blah blah blah...
Oh, and all your banking costs will go up shortly to cover our collective behinds.

Lowballing an interest rate that serves as the benchmark for many commercial and consumer loans resulted in decreased borrowing costs to loan recipients.

That is exactly what Ben Bernanke is doing with Operation Twist (and why the Feds nationalized Fannie and Freddi), and they haven't been indicted.

If you were saving in a LIBOR+ account or a floating rate bond, then you got screwed.
Otherwise, Barclays reduced the cost of borrowing on all LIBOR based loans, NOT out of altruism, but to improve their own perceived credit risk.

Next thing ya' know the 99% will be casting aspersions against Phil and Wendy Gramm! (Now there's a couple deserving of adjoining cells.)

Old Zeb: tell me about it. I'm no fan of my current Senator, John "Man on Box Turtle" Cornyn, but he's much more King Log than Gramm's King Stork. Gramm did for economic theory what Jeffrey Dahmer did for vegan cuisine, and lower than that I can't get.

And BIG oil doesn't fix prices either. La, La-La...

My job is in finance. I always assumed banks manipulated LIBOR. The system is banks all get together and announce a set price – an absolutely horrible idea. It’s naïve to think these people would act in an ethical manner under these circumstances. What surprises me is that apparently they have been manipulating the rates down.

What are you going to do? Between the old-line guys like Schumer (and Gramm et al) that basically run interference for Wall Street, I think regulation is a poor choice of words.

As far as Bernanke/Geithner managing this, they cant find their a$$ with either hand. Meanwhile, as noted above, Bernanke keeps trying the same old tricks over and over and over and over, because, gosh, they've worked before.

Well, I guess if you count giving banks a bunch of cheap money working, then OK.

The Bank of Posturepedic looks better every day doesn't it?

At least in the UK they still have something called "indignation". In the US, we just hand the poor inconvenienced bank tens of billions of dollars, and say "No one could have seen it coming. Act of god. Let's not play the blame game."

I always read financial articles wondering how long 'til they mention derivatives. You'd be surprised how many articles don't mention them at all even when talking about their impact on the world economy's vast problems.

The first link gets to derivatives in the second paragraph - that's good.

But the second link is back to avoidance mode with this hilarious sentence: "The pricing of $350 trillion of financial products, including credit cards, mortgages and student loans, is pegged to Libor and other such rates."

Sure, credit cards. "Honey, I went over our credit limit on the AmEX card. What? How much did I go over? 350 trillion. Of course that includes the kid's student loan."

There is a deliberate attempt by the tightly controlled media to present this story in a way that avoids any realization by the public that these casino-like gambling bets are the problem.

The last thing that the Goldman Sachs types want is accountability so every effort is made to distract from how we got here.

To be fair: There finally was some accountability in the big-time world of Wall Street finance: Henry Paulson's kid fired a soccer coach.

Matt Taibbi wrote about this on June 21st in Rolling Stone:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620

...and has followed up since then with seven blog posts, the latest yesterday:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog