Blame Barclays, Not Capitalism

Why aren’t more people furious about the Libor scandal?

That’s a question mostly being asked on the political left these days, and they’re right to ask it.
Here are the basics: Barclays is the second-largest bank in Britain and one of the largest in the world. It has admitted to U.S. and British regulators that it manipulated the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which basically measures how much it costs banks to borrow money from one another for various periods of time. If you ever read the fine print on a home mortgage, credit-card agreement, or car loan, you’ve seen reference to Libor.
Indeed, a conservative estimate is that some $350 trillion in bonds and loans are pegged to Libor worldwide. That’s more than 20 times the GDP of the United States.
In e-mail exchanges between Barclays’ New York traders and the bank officials who are supposed to submit honest data to the entity that calculates Libor, it’s clear that the bank routinely rigged the data to maximize profits. It was so routine that nobody even bothered to hide their corruption in euphemism. One official responded to a request from a trader to fix the number, “Always happy to help, leave it with me, Sir.” Another replied, “Done . . . for you big boy.”

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/308431/blame-barclays-not-capitalism-jonah-goldberg