LIBOR, the shoes are dropping from the sky.

Anyone else following the LIBOR scandal that started in the UK and is spreading like a wildfire across the global banking industry?

If not, this could be a good popcorn and beer opportunity. If you can still afford those things.

Libor — that’s the London interbank offered rate — represents a series of interest rates at which banks make unsecured loans to each other. More important, it is a benchmark that many financial instruments are pegged to. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which doggedly pursued the wrongdoing and brought the scandal to light, estimates that some $350 trillion worth of derivatives and $10 trillion worth of loans are based on Libor.

But...but many will say, that's in London.

But this story stretches far beyond Britain. Barclays is the first bank in the spotlight because it offered to co-operate fully with regulators. It will not be the last. Investigations into the fixing of LIBOR and other rates are also under way in America, Canada and the EU. Between them, these probes cover many of the biggest names in finance: the likes of Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Deutsche Bank and HSBC. Employees, from New York to Tokyo, are implicated (see article).

With the way the banks have colluded since even before the crash, is it plausible to think that this was isolated? Since the late 1990's when the US removed Glass Steagal under Clinton things have been shifting fast in favour of the worldwide banking mafia.  They hold too much power. 

LIBOR is just the latest scandal as anyone following the actual news would know. I like to read Matt Taibbi and many other actual investigative journalists. What those people say is simply mind boggling, and explained in pretty simple terms..

This bank is like the world's worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt's funeral. They're out of control, yet they'll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.

Here is an interview with Taibbi on Elliot Spitzers show explaining just why more of us should be paying attention...

And, another piece that appeared on Bill Moyer (I was so happy to see this man come back out of retirement...)Yves Smith, another great straight talker is in here too.

Just listen to them rattle off just a fraction of the times banks have been caught breaking the rules and getting off with just fines.
The rules that still exist, are simply considered as guidlines to the banks. They pay the fine and then do it again anyway.
Glass Steagal was the act written after the crash which caused the great depression of the 1930's which separated commercial and investment banking.

Did you know that there are many out there in the US banking industry who are publically voicing regret at the repeal of much of Glass Steagal? Too little too late.

Even Bill Clinton regrets.

Oh sure, there have been "attempts" at re-regulating the banks, but the banks objected and gutted the new rules, and Canadian banks and the Harper Government objected....

Whaaaaaaaaaa???? 

Kinda funny.

We had struck down our own versions of Glass Steagal a few years earlier, yet another gift from Mulroney. 

So what now? 

My personal wish list is to break up all the banks. The too big to fail thing has to go. The rabid "pro capitalists" have not got a leg to stand on with any of this. Because this is not capitalism. 

Our own banks are deep in the muck and mire, and we are indeed paying for their speculations and greed too.
Un-globalize them. As has been proven, it only takes one to take out every country in the world.
Like I say, that is on the wish list. They have it all so tied up now that we are all one with the borg.

A recent report issued by the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives (CCPA)[4] has recently demonstrated that even though transparency laws do not exist in Canada as they do in the Euro zone or American banking sector, it can be proven that since 2009, Canadian banks have received upwards of $114 billion dollars of bailout (not counting leveraging) via the CHMC which provided $69 billion for the purchase of toxic assets held by the “big five Canadian banks”, with much of the remainder coming from the Fed’s discount window. While defenders of the monetarist faith scream that we had a liquidity injection not a bailout, Shakespeare would only retort that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”… except that in this case, the rose is a rotting corpse.

If you or I "fail" we have to work hard and fix things on our own. The "pro Capitalists" scream about those needing social programs and the like to help us when they have ruined the economy and destroyed our futures. 

But when they really screw up quite intentionally, they simply hold out their hands and demand that we bail them out. 

Are we finally done with this inequality and recipe for ruin?
It depends on who owns whom. And it's very apparent that the Harper Government and in truth past Liberal Governments are not working for us.

Will change ever happen? Highly doubtful unless people actually get angry enough to demand it.

At the moment so many are telling Occupy to sit down and shut up, putting down the students in Quebec for daring to try to have a voice in their own furture...

Which generation broke it BTW?