International
bankers continue to act as though they own the planet and we are only pawns on
their chessboard. No lessons are learned. No sentences are handed down. No
executions are conducted the cellar. Fraud, larceny, and criminal incompetence
continue unchecked. In recent weeks JP Morgan has been caught playing the same
old billion dollar shell game. In the UK, customers of Nat West and RBS have
been unable to access their own money after an unprecedented computer failure
following the outsourcing of a creaking computer system to poorly trained
and even more poorly paid technicians. And now Channel 4 News tells me that…
“A vast story has broken,
concerning banking dishonesty on what the regulator, the FSA, calls a “serious,
widespread and extended” scale. It has called the action misconduct, and fined
Barclays, as have American regulators, which all adds up to £290m. In
short, Barclays got the people who report their interest rates to the British
Bankers Association (these are collated from all the major banks to fix the
official Libor rate) to try and manipulate their rate. It’s one of the biggest
scandals to hit the City of London and it speaks of extremely loose and even
louche practices. The reporting from Barclays, according to the FSA, amounted
to a straight lie. The bankers, on senior executives’ instructions (we’re not
told any names) were simply told to understate the true level of interest to
enable the bank to sustain trading profits. It’s all so bad, that the ever
resistant Barclay’s boss, Bob Diamond, has finally given in on his huge bonus
and accepted that he cannot claim it. The biggest question tonight, given that
it is so widespread and so deep - why is this activity not regarded as fraud,
and why is no-one being prosecuted?”
But the
problem goes far deeper than even astronomical global racketeering and levels
of greed that now covert sums of money that can only be abstractions. The Nobel
economist Paul Krugman reports in the NY Times how bankers and their political
lackeys are so busy looting the coffers and so dedicated to their notional games
of impossible acquisition, they have abdicated any responsibility for an
economic crisis that could lay waste to the developed world.
“None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western
nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to
restore prosperity — and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than
our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them.
But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use
them. And that’s what seems to be happening. The fundamentals of the world
economy aren’t, in themselves, all that scary; it’s the almost universal
abdication of responsibility that fills me, and many other economists, with a
growing sense of dread.”
The secret word is Suppurating
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