It's Friday. It's financial. It's Friday Financial with
JULIAN SAYER.
They're not bankers, they're gamblers and they are
playing with a rigged deck of cards. Worse still they're playing with our
money. Read on for the low down on how the banksters are fixing
everything.
LOADED DICE IN THE WORLD CASINO!
As I have
explained previously, banking and finance is at the very heart of this system
we live in. It promotes economic growth and allows companies to conduct their
business around the world, in a fair and honest way. Or so the story goes? Well
that's alright then isn't it? But what if I told you that the whole system is
rigged?
The
entire financial world is governed by the central banks who oversee the large
investment banks that make the markets of finance and commodities. There has
always been rumours of rigging within the financial markets, but it is only
just becoming clear what a toxic industry it is. It seems whatever the market
is, they will fix it.
Conspiracy
theorists of the world, we sceptics owe you an apology. You were right. The
players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world
is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related
corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's
largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
Currency
trading is the latest addition to the "rigged" column, here is a
summary of the known market manipulation scandals (because it can be
problematic keeping track of them all by now)
Libor -
interest rates
ISDAfix -
swaps
Platts -
oil prices
WM/Reuters
- FX
High-Frequency
Trading - equities
Aluminium
Energy.
The
latest to hit the headlines is the foreign exchange markets and this one is
particularly troublesome because the Bank of England seems to have known about
it for some time. A fair review of the foreign exchange scandal can be found
here
The
principal charges in this allege that currency traders at some banks made
rigged trades designed to lose money — then took cash kickbacks from
co-conspirators who made money on the deals. Yes, it's very easy to
understand. There's a lot of money
involved and very, very few consequences. If power corrupts then absolute power corrupts
absolutely.
