Swiss bank UBS said Wednesday it will pay a $1.5 billion fraud fine for orchestrating the manipulation of benchmark interest rates in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Last week, British bank HSBC agreed to pay $1.92 billion -- the largest bank fine ever -- to settle a U.S. investigation into the bank’s alleged money laundering with drug cartels. But still, UBS’s stiff penalty is more than three times the $450 million fine levied on British bank Barclays in June, which had also admitted to rigging the LIBOR rate, which is used to price worldwide loans. It hasn’t been a good couple of years for UBS, which also lost $2.3 billion in a rogue trading scandal earlier this year.

Reuters:

Dozens of UBS staff rigged the Libor rate, which is used to price trillions of dollars worth of loans, in collusion with brokers and traders at other banks, according to an investigation by authorities in multiple countries.

The controversy is expected to ensnare other big lenders and spark criminal and civil lawsuits against individuals involved. The penalty UBS agreed with U.S., UK and Swiss authorities far exceeds the $450 million levied on Britain's Barclays in June, also for rigging Libor, and the second largest ever imposed on a bank.

"This is an endemic banking industry problem and shows how far the industry has fallen, failing itself and its customers," said Neil Dwane, chief investment officer for Allianz Global Investors.

"For the future it shows that without strong regulation and strong and new management throughout most of the biggest banks, there can be no reasonable expectation that they will improve their behavior substantially - at least UBS now has strong new management."

(Emphasis mine.)

Unfortunately, it still seems that strong regulation of the banks ranks right up there with jail time for criminal bankers.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi spoke to Democracy Now! on July 19, where he discussed the pattern of systemic corruption by 16 banks accused of rigging a key global interest rate used in contracts worth trillions of dollars.

The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is the average interest rate at which banks can borrow from each other. Some analysts say it defines the cost of money. Barclays was recently fined $453 million for rigging Libor, and a number of other banks are under investigation. "Ordinary people actually suffered when Libor was manipulated downward, mainly because local governments, municipal governments tended to lose money," Taibbi says. "Even the tiniest manipulation downward, when you’re talking about a thing of this scale, would result in tens of trillions of dollars of losses. The banks weren’t doing this just to make themselves look healthier, they were also doing this just to make money. They were trading against this information in what essentially was the biggest kind of insider trading you could possibly imagine."

Full transcript available here.

[Probably not suitable for work.]

This is your Moment of Clarity #154: As most of you know, the LIBOR banking scandal is rocking the world. Here's the quickest and easiest explanation you'll find anywhere. And only three minutes long!

Keep Fighting,

-Lee

"The mob learned from Wall Street," comments Eliot Spitzer on the "cartel-style corruption" behind the Libor scam.

On Current TV's "Viewpoint" recently, host Eliot Spitzer, Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone contributing editor, and Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, analyze the Libor interest rate--rigging scandal engulfing the banking industry.

Barclays CEO Bob Diamond recently resigned after the bank was fined $453 million for its part in the scandal, which involved manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), a key global benchmark for interest rates, by essentially "faking their credit scores," according to Taibbi. And as Taibbi explains, Barclays couldn't have acted alone.
...

Kelleher argues that the Libor scandal is proof that the financial industry "is corrupt and rotten to its core." "The same executives [using] the same business model that crashed the entire financial system in '08 are still running these banks," he says.
...

"It can't just be Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland. In fact, it can't even be four banks or even five banks," Taibbi says. "Really, in the end it's probably going to come out that it's going to be all of them ... involved in this. And that's what's critical for people to understand: that this is a cartel-style corruption."

For much more on this, start with Matt Taibbi here.