Everything Is Rigged

Rolling Stone: Everything Is Rigged:
The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international 

conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix

Illustration by Victor Juhasz
By MATT TAIBBI
April 25, 2013 1:00 PM ET

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, 

we skeptics 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.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand 

too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of 

upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into 

public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs 

by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, 

the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that 

sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP 

may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the

 world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, 

and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any 

manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are 

the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that 

serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have 

already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to 

Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-

debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that 

there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of 

collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

Read more:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425#ixzz2Rh8LMon1