Barclays are caught in the act.
Others are not.
Gold price also has the similar story.
‘Ours is not to reason why’ -but to suffer.
‘The British and US authorities said they had found evidence Barclays had attempted to manipulate a key borrowing rate for years, meaning that home owners could have paid millions more in mortgage payments than they might otherwise have had to.
Traders at the bank were discovered to have engaged in regular attempts to determine the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) from as early as 2005.
The manipulation of Libor saw the bank make submissions to the setters of the rate that they knew to be wrong as they attempted to influence the level at which it was fixed.
Barclays also attempted to suppress Libor, which means that savers could have potentially lost out on millions in interest due to the rate being lower than it should otherwise have been.
Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond is to forgo his bonus after the bank was fined a total of £290m.
Andrew Tyrie MP, chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, said: “This was a serious breach. I am very concerned about it. The price setting mechanism of Libor is crucial to the integrity of the markets. This appears to have been put at risk. From the information I have, it looks inexcusable.”
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) handed the bank a $200m (£128m) penalty for “attempted manipulation of and false reporting concerning Libor and Euribor benchmark interest rates”, while Barclays has agreed to pay a $160m penalty as part of an agreement with the US Justice Department.
David Meister, the CFTC’s director of enforcement, said: “The American public and our markets rely upon the integrity of benchmark interest rates like LIBOR and Euribor because they form the basis for hundreds of trillions of dollars of transactions and affect nearly every corner of the global economy.
“Banks that contribute information to those benchmarks must do so honestly. When a bank acts in its own self-interest by attempting to manipulate these rates for profit, or by submitting false reports that result from senior management orders to lower submissions to guard the bank’s reputation, the integrity of benchmark interest rates is undermined. The CFTC launched this investigation to protect the markets and the public from such illegal conduct, and today’s action demonstrates that we will bring the full force of our authority to bear as we carry out that mission.”
The UK’s Financial Services Authority has imposed its largest ever penalty of £59.5m.
The CFTC found that finds that “Barclays attempted to manipulate and made false reports concerning two global benchmark interest rates, Libor and Euribor, on numerous occasions and sometimes on a daily basis over a four-year period, commencing as early as 2005”.
Libor is used to price more than £200 trillion of financial products around the world, including everything from home loans to the most complex credit derivatives. Euribor measures the cost of borrowing in the European Union.
In a statement, Mr Diamond said that he and three other senior managers would hand back their bonuses for 2012 in light of the fines: “The events which gave rise to today’s resolutions relate to past actions which fell well short of the standards to which Barclays aspires in the conduct of its business.’
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