A New Financial Scandal - Bigger Than LIBOR?

Bloomberg reported yesterday that five whistleblowers who have been working as foreign exchange traders have stated that the $5 trillion foreign exchange market is rigged. They allege that the world's biggest banks have been systematically manipulating the foreign exchange rates used to set the value of trillions of dollars of investments and derivatives. The main target of this has been pension funds all over the world.

Not surprisingly the centre of this activity has been the City of London, just as with LIBOR.

The traders told Bloomberg that the banks were actively trading against their clients by making use of a 60 second window in which trading is supposed to be paused. The traders told Bloomberg that, "dealers colluded with counterparties to boost chances of moving the rates."

Link

Poor citizens of the world have to be on scandal overload. Governments are corrupt to the bone as well as the bankers that own them. There are many people that are aware of HFT but I don't think most people are fully cognizant of how the markets are rigged to benefit TBTF and the primary dealers.

reply to post by GrantedBail

Governments are corrupt to the bone as well as the bankers that own them

same in my country..

Yep....last week....it is bigger than libor...or a tie......that's not real underhanded for us retail online traders....I'm clobbering the market as we speak.....like 3% in 25 minutes....three times a day....

sometimes 45% a day

reply to post by GBP/JPY


I bet your mama's real proud!

It's a shame that our world is plagued by bottom feeders that only know one way...Manipulate the efforts and profits of others for their own gain. They themselves are too selfish to actually produce something that betters the human race and to me they are just glorified bums without their hats out. What's the line...A man with a briefcase can steal way more than a man with a gun

reply to post by minkmouse


This is what the little person doesn't understand - This is how you get clobbered when you buy a house, get a mortgage, then have to pay for gas at $4.00 a gallon - and watch your house go underwater - and watch your credit card bill go to 25%.

These people are dealing with no money - in fact, losses - and betting to get money that they're going to lose money.

And the little people keep paying the bills because they don't want to lose the house they live in.

The house of cards these people are playing will eventually fall down.

I wish all of us little people had enough guts to stop paying our mortgages and credit card bills all at once.
Then put these people in jail - and confiscate the rest from their families and make them live in little trailers that reek of formaldehyde.

One thing I have learnt in my time so far to get ahead in this retrace of life - then one must

Cheat
Lie
Deceive
Manipulate
Take advantage of others
Talk bull#
Posture
Forget morals
Believe £,$,€ are gods

It's really really pathetic.

PDUK

Let me know when the trials start

reply to post by PurpleDog UK


That's why the MEEK will inherit the earth. It's also why I look down on most people who are doing well.

reply to post by sligtlyskeptical


Exactly. We are asked,"What's wrong with someone making a fortune?" "Do you have something against people making money?" "Do you hate the rich just because they are successful?"

No, I distrust their methods . . . therefore I distrust them!

reply to post by Happy1

Finally, somebody who figured out the truth.

I thought I was alone.

If we all just stopped, it would all just stop.

The system depends on our depending on it.

Slavery, in a word.

We are allowed to build our own cage, and work some crappy paying, soul crushing job pay for it, and ignorantly believe we are free.

The more one takes from a man, the freer that man is, unless he refuses to realize he is a slave, and then being free is his greatest fear.

We have all been domesticated.

MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

As I wrote on another thread, New Zeland's Prime Minister John Key is heavily involved in the GFC.

John Key began his career as a FOREX trader. There are strong claims that he was involved in the 1997 attack on the New Zealand Dollar. Later he moved to London to work for Merrill Lynch. He was deeply involved in the derivatives trade and in the process of moving large sums to Ireland on behalf of Merrill Lynch in Ireland now crippling the Ireland population.

If that wasn't bad enough, he went to work for the Federal Reserve!

Should this man be running a country?

This is how it is sold as:

In political terms both Key and Brash are relative novices. They have been in Parliament for a mere term, compared with the Labour firm's eight terms. But voters should be able to look past their relative political inexperience to their huge "real-world" experiences, as Merrill Lynch operative and a former New Zealand Reserve Bank governor. In Key's case he can also point to the invitation he received in 1999 to join the Foreign Exchange Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as further evidence of his economic management credentials. Game on.

www.nzherald.co.nz...

reply to post by GrantedBail

When our representatives are allowed to use their insider knowledge to base stock trading and investments on, there's no doubt they're all corrupt to the bone.

The one thing that had given me hope was the bill that Congress and the president both signed into law that made this practice illegal. Then they went ahead and repealed it. It was all show during an election cycle.

Nothing happened to those involved in the LIBOR scam and it's doubtful anything will happen with this new scandal.

Originally posted by Happy1
reply to post by minkmouse

 

This is what the little person doesn't understand - This is how you get clobbered when you buy a house, get a mortgage, then have to pay for gas at $4.00 a gallon - and watch your house go underwater - and watch your credit card bill go to 25%.

These people are dealing with no money - in fact, losses - and betting to get money that they're going to lose money.

And the little people keep paying the bills because they don't want to lose the house they live in.

The house of cards these people are playing will eventually fall down.

I wish all of us little people had enough guts to stop paying our mortgages and credit card bills all at once.
Then put these people in jail - and confiscate the rest from their families and make them live in little trailers that reek of formaldehyde.

Their time will come - we call them "spiv's" in the UK (from the black market rackeeters in World War II, who knew where to get anything you needed, so long as the price is right).
www.dodgy-rodge.com...

They keep trying to push up house-prices. There was a lot of that going on the UK. Traditionally, a couple would buy a dilapidated "fixer-upper" home and renovate it before moving on to somewhere better after a good few years. But property developers realized that they could do the whole shebang in three months, buying up a property, doing it up, selling it off, and moving onto another home. We also have "quantitative easing" which is another fancy word for printing money. People cheer for joy when they read that their home has gone up in value, yet they don't understand why food and energy prices keep rising at the same rate.

In the end it's only international buyers who can afford the new property prices, and the locals have to migrate or even emigrate.

reply to post by sligtlyskeptical

The "Meek" are us.

The "Meek" are those critters you murder as nuisance pests.

For once I have decided to reply after lurking as a reader for years....

I've worked in wholesale FX markets now for 15 years. This was no secret to FX traders/banks and get this....institutional clients too.

Most pension funds, asset managers care only about the risk of their stock and bond portfolios and not of the currency trades. They wanted someone to take that risk on against a "public" benchmark so they could check the box and say the met the benchmark on currency trades.

Many of these clients did not want to have to do the work to manage the risk themselves. So as long as they are not paying an explicit transaction cost they didn't care....less work, less risk.

At the end of the day it's the end client...the people with their money in these funds...your pension money etc that get hurt. Problem is the people managing your money don't really care...they care about their benchmarks and how they get paid.

This willfull ignorance is not much different than all of the lawsuits happening between funds and custodians over "egregious" FX spreads. I'm sorry but institutional investors knew that they were paying high spreads/transaction fees. One of the reasons they "looked the other way" was because these fees subsidized other services from the custodians which helped keep their management expenses low and helped their compensation.

Again...this isn't just the "banksters". The people managing YOUR money in pensions and mutual funds are playing the same game for the same reason...self preservation and profit.

But no...most of us aren't the super rich elite like we are made out to be...maybe upper middle class struggling to pay the bills and our ex wives.

Originally posted by MyHappyDogShiner
reply to post by Happy1

 

Finally, somebody who figured out the truth.

I thought I was alone.

If we all just stopped, it would all just stop.

The system depends on our depending on it.

Slavery, in a word.

We are allowed to build our own cage, and work some crappy paying, soul crushing job pay for it, and ignorantly believe we are free.

The more one takes from a man, the freer that man is, unless he refuses to realize he is a slave, and then being free is his greatest fear.

We have all been domesticated.

MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Problem is we all distrust even each other! For us all to just stop slaving we would need to trust one another and this will never happen cause TPTB did their jobs so well that we are unable to trust even our own family members! How many families do you know that are fighting over money? Cause I know plenty that are.

Originally posted by stormcell


In the end it's only international buyers who can afford the new property prices, and the locals have to migrate or even emigrate.

edit on 19-6-2013 by stormcell because: (no reason given)

Sometimes I think that is the intent, to create living conditions designed to utterly destroy every single Caucasianoid peoples, in Europe and abroad.

The long term outcome of every single Western nation's social, economic and political policy will lead to the partial or total destruction of the peoples that compose it, and with them the West itself.

reply to post by GrantedBail


Please, this is the tip of the iceberg. Wait till American's learn that the bankers/globalists/Eurocentrics, have been playing a currency game these last few years that forces Americans to subsidize European economic and energy interests. You see, they have been using the Dollar to back the Euro via Quantitative Easing.

This enables the EU to purchase energy and finance it's governments. You see, oil, gas, diesel, kerosene, are all incredibly dirt cheap at the moment. So cheap, that without the currency devaluations of the last 8+ years, gas would probably be cheaper than during the 90's.

In such a scenario of cheap energy, Americans would likely use most, if not all of it. It would leave no additional fuel for export, and with that scenario, the EU would rip apart at the seems as the Euro wouldn't be able to buy any energy. EU member states wouldn't even be able to finance their own governments.

With the currency devaluation, American's can only afford to consume energy that they need, if it all(given the rampant increases in homelessness, utility shut offs, and other hardships). All they have to do, is ensure that the Dollars value is lower than the Euro's value to keep the racket going.

Then the EU governments can tax the heck out of oil to finance core parts of their governments. This enables them to go easier on corporate taxes then they normally would have too, with the rest picked up by income and sales, taxes.

It seems that the goal is to keep not only the dollar at a lower value then the euro, but to keep the euro at a lower value then the british pound.

It is not surprising though, look how much Britain imports from EU members:
www.guardian.co.uk...

If the Euro ever surpassed the Pound, I would imagine the british would be spending a much, much larger percentage of their incomes on food(if they are able to afford food given domestic british crop failures).

In an economic sense, America is a colony of the British again. What this means for relations between the EU and the UK, who is using whom, it is hard to say, They are probably both in cahoots to loot America dry.

reply to post by GrantedBail


This is old news. We knew for a few years now they will engineer another collapse through the derivatives market similar to how they did it in 2008, but this time to steal our pension funds.