May 7, 2013

Your Retirement for a Bottle of Champagne: How Wall Street Fraudsters Ripped You Off, Again | Alternet

Your Retirement for a Bottle of Champagne: How Wall Street Fraudsters Ripped You Off, Again | Alternet
"To recap: Bank hustlers manipulated the world’s most important set of benchmark interest rates and thereby impacted the prices of upward of $500 trillion worth of financial instruments. The LIBOR scam devastated state and municipal budgets, squeezed pension yields and ripped off bank shareholders. In a case of jaw-dropping fraud, greedy traders rigged up the benchmark so that they could cash in on bets on derivatives, while banks submitted fake numbers to make themselves look financially healthier. One Barclays official was fond of fudging numbers in exchange for champagne. “Dude…I owe you big time!” gushed a trader in an email to Barclays’ Mr. Fix-It. “Come over one day after work and I'm opening a bottle of Bollinger."
That’s right. A bottle of bubbly for a scam that screwed your grandma on her retirement savings."