HuffingtonPost.com
Arianna Huffington
Posted: 07/26/2012 12:57 pm
It's looking like arrests are imminent in the Libor scandal, with U.S. and European investigators closing in on more than a dozen traders. It is impossible not to be outraged by flagrant deception: For at least four years -- from 2005 to 2009 -- Barclays Bank, among, apparently, many others, intentionally manipulated the interest rate benchmark Libor (the London Interbank Offered Rate), to which trillions of dollars of financial instruments, including millions of mortgages, credit card rates, and small business loans, are pegged. In the last week of June, Barclays reached an agreement with British and American regulators to pay a $450 million fine, and three top officials of the bank, including CEO Robert Diamond, resigned.
Just how serious is the scale of this fraud? Some say that the amount tied to Libor is $360 trillion, some say $500 trillion, while others put it as high as $800 trillion.
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