Shocking! Have Gas Prices Been Manipulated Too?

Was the petrol price rigged too?  Found this trolling on Godlike Productions, from The Telegraph/UK.  Excerpts:



Motorists may have been paying too much for their petrol because banks and other traders are likely to have tried to manipulate oil prices in the same way they rigged interest rates, an official report has warned.


Concerns are growing about the reliability of oil prices, after a report for the G20 found the market is wide open to “manipulation or distortion”.



Traders from banks, oil companies or hedge funds have an “incentive” to distort the market and are likely to try to report false prices, it said.


Politicians and fuel campaigners last night urged the Government to expand its inquiry into the Libor scandal to see whether oil prices have also been falsely pushed up.


They warned any efforts to rig the oil price would affect how much drivers pay at the pump, which soared to a record high of 137p per litre of unleaded earlier this year.

Robert Halfon, who led a group of 100 MPs calling for lower fuel prices, said the matter “needs to be looked at by the Bank of England urgently”.

I'm sure The Bank of England will jump right into a comprehensive investigation and get to the bottom of this Shocking!  Scandal..  Uh huh..  The only thing Shocking! about this report is that people still find the idea of Oil and Gas and Gold and Silver and Interest Rate price manipulation Shocking(!).  Seriously, if Speculators can affect commodities prices, don't you think that prices can be fixed on a more "institutional" level?  And that price fixing has been happening for..  Forever?  Also, to clarify:  This is, as of now, a British financial scandal, but due to global inter-connectedness, how long do you think it'll take for these same accusations to surface in the US?  A lot longer, probably, given the shitty state of American bought and paid for media, also called "The Liberal Media," by those who obviously have no fucking clue as to what is happening all around them!

Also, in case those in finance trot out the old "It was an accident, and we'll all do better next time," my "very good Internet friend" Bartcop puts it best:  If you benefit from "mistakes" you keep making, can you honestly continue to call them "mistakes," as opposed to "strategy?"  Not verbatim, of course, but you get the gist..

LI(E)BOR-Gate Crosses Ocean, Blows Up Real Big..

US Attorneys General Jump On The Lieborgate Bandwagon; 900,000+ Lawsuits To Follow, And What Happens Next?  What does happen next, Zero Hedge?

The second Barclays announced its $450 million Libor settlement, it was all over - the lawyers smelled not only blood, but what may be the biggest plaintiff feeding frenzy of all time. Which is why it was only a matter of time: "State attorneys general are jumping into the widening scandal over whether banks tried to manipulate benchmark international lending rates, a move that could open a new front against the top global banks. A handful of state attorneys general said they are looking into whether they have jurisdiction over the banks, and are starting preliminary discussions to determine what kind of impact the conduct involving the Libor rate may have had in their states."


From Reuters:

"Our office is aware of the allegations around the manipulation of the Libor, and we are working with other state agencies to determine whether Massachusetts has suffered any losses as a result," a spokesman for Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said. A spokesman for Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi said his office is aware of the recent settlement reached by British bank Barclays with U.S. and UK authorities and "will look at the case to the extent that our office might have any jurisdiction in the matter."


A spokeswoman for the Massachusetts transportation authority, MassDOT, said the agency "is actively investigating its portfolio for the purpose of determining if it was underpaid on its bonds due to the brewing Libor situation," as are many other issuers of debt whose rate is governed by Libor.

Lawyers for several states have had early discussions about whether they might pool investigative resources and launch a broader, multi-state effort, but no formal consortium has been established yet, people familiar with the discussions said. New York might be expected to lead such an effort, since most of the banks' U.S. operations are based there. A spokesman for the New York attorney general declined comment on whether the issue is being looked at.
Some municipalities, including the city of Baltimore, and funds including the Frankfurt-based Metzler Investment GmbH, which manages 47 billion euros ($59 billion) in assets, have already sued more than a dozen banks, arguing they were bilked of potentially billions of dollars.

How many potential lawsuits are we talking about here? Quite a bit in fact as the FT explains:

There are at least 900,000 outstanding US home loans indexed to Libor that were originated from 2005 to 2009, the period the key lending gauge may have been rigged, investigators have said. Those mortgages carry an unpaid principal balance of $275bn, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a bank regulator.

Also, as explained here before, not only is this a legal bonanza, but it will be a political feast for the Congressional circus to earn numerous C-SPAN brownie points.

“I think the US government should be just as aggressive in getting to the bottom of this scandal as the United Kingdom has been,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, chair of the bank regulatory subcommittee on the Senate banking committee.



“This was not isolated to London, but affected tens of millions of investors, borrowers and taxpayers in our country as well,” Mr Brown added.

What does the above mean?
1) Starting today and going forward, there will be numerous essays, "analyses" and white papers, all of which will try to estimate (some on a paid basis) the damages and impact of the Libor manipulation that took place at least in the period under discussion 2005-2009. All of these will be absolutely wrong, as nobody has any clear idea of how the cumulative impact of the Libor rate, which may have been pushed below either lower or higher depending on how it suited a given BBA-member bank, over a period of years will have impacted hundreds of trillions in partially offsetting notional securities. Therefore, while one day it may have led to impairments, another day it would benefit the end-holder of a given interest-rate sensitive product. But they will try. And the bigger the number, the better, which leads us to...


2) The lawyers will crawl out of the woodwork like worms after a torrential downpour, and will all be willing to work on contingency, telling potential clients they are owed thousands, nay, millions based on such and such analysis. All they need is to have held a mortgage, or a credit card, or any variable interest liability in the 4 years in question. And to sign the dotted line.


3) The resulting lawsuits, most of which in class action format, will be of gargantuan proportions, simply to encourage settlement, as ongoing litigation will easily destroy the financial system. The litigation reserves at the TBTF banks will explode and will cause years of EPS writedowns. But at least they will be one-time charges, so the stocks don't get crushed too much. That said, forget any growth out of the banking sector, and certainly the 16 BBA member banks, all of whom are about to be sued to smithereens in civil suits as more and more banks step up and settle to avoid criminal prosecution.


4) The biggest irony is that the torrent of upcoming suits will be in effect targeting none other than the Fed. Because while banks which all were massively levered to even a one basis point move in Libor were very sensitive to the smallest variations in 3 month USD libor, end-clients who did not have this leverage were far less impaired. But that doesn't matter: after all the same clients were impaired through gross borderline criminal negligence which is all that matters in a court of law (assuming the honorable judge John Roberts is not presiding pro hac vice). Thus the entity that will be sued by proxy is the Federal Reserve, whose Federal Funds rate is really the setter for the baseline Libor rate. Note the chart below which shows that over the past decade, the 3M USD Libor and the Fed Funds rate were virtually interchangeable: (Chart available at the link..)
 
Yet while it was the Fed's decisions at the bottom of it all, unless someone implicates the Fed or the BOE further, both will get away scott free: after all what they do is public policy, for the public good and to defend their various appointed mandates. And neither pushed banks to manipulate their rates (even if both were well aware there was gambling going on here), or so they claim, even when presented with evidence to the contrary.



What will really happen, is that the private banks, having been bailed out by the central banks at the taxpayers' dime, will now serve as a buffer to protect these same institutions from rising popular anger, not just at Lieborgate, but Robosigning, Robosettlement, CDOs, rehypothecation, High Frequency Trading, toxic assets marked-to-unicorns, the end of Mark-to-Market, ZIRP, NIRP, expert networks, insider trading, MF Global, and countless other examples of what happens when financial fraud is let loose with no fear of consequence in a Bernanke Put world.


As a result, the status quo will literally buy itself a few more years as it delays the tipping point by any means necessary, in the process kicking back a little to politicians, lawyers, and the general public in exchange for a few years of subpar earnings for bank shareholders that should have been wiped out back in 2008 anyway. And everyone will be happy.


That's how Lieborgate will play out.

I'm down with the article's overall cynicism, but I don't quite agree:  The above post is a little too rosy a prediction regarding the status quo.  This numbers, players, and their connections will ultimately be too big to be ignored or downplayed(No matter how many people become complicit), especially when paired with economic black hole that is derivatives.  How do you visualize/quantify 600 plus trillion dollars?  This is the preliminary level of the upcoming financial conflagration..

Things That Make You Go Hmmm - Such As The Transition From Conspiracy Theory To Conspiracy Fact

Here comes the LIBOR scandal!  And it's BIG.  And probably The Tipping Point for all Financials.  BIG.  From Grant Williams, author of Things That Make You Go Hmmm, via Zero Hedge:



Attempts to manipulate free markets invariably end badly - after all, they are, supposedly, by their very nature, free.


Over the past few weeks, the exposure of the Libor-rigging scandal has monopolized the headlines of the financial press and inveigled its way onto the front pages of every major news publication in the world through the sheer size and scale of the story.


Something as big as this just CAN’T be hidden from the public.


Only... it can.


It has been. It no doubt still is to a certain extent. I’m not going to go through all of the events of the past few weeks as you are no doubt familiar with them, but [simply understanding how LIBOR works makes for a simple conclusion].


I’m afraid it’s rather obvious. Given that almost half the reported inputs that help establish the Libor rate are discarded immediately, Barclays simply CANNOT have manipulated the Libor rate alone. Period.

What’s more, to effectively ensure the rate is set at the price required, you’d need to not only establish the highest and lowest 25% of prices, but then ensure the remaining 50% average out to the required rate and, based on the fact that there are 16 banks that submit rates, that would mean about 13 of the 16 involved would need to be complicit.



As a very good friend of mine put it earlier this week; at best this is a cartel, at worst it’s outright fraud on a scale that is completely unprecedented.


So for five years there have been attempts to fix the Libor rate and, take it from me, during that time, many inside the financial industry were familiar with the rumors of such manipulation but it was another huge scandal with such high powered connected interests that it would no doubt be brushed squarely under the carpet. Forget ‘too big to fail’. This was ‘too deep to prove’.


Libor is so important to so many people in the financial industry that the question of why it was manipulated really ought to be framed differently:

Assuming you COULD manipulate something as important and potentially beneficial as the Libor rate with such ease for years, why wouldn’t you?

The answer to this question would ordinarily be:

"Because it’s illegal and government regulators would throw the book at us"

So, working from the ground up; we have a set of traders looking to produce the best profits they can for personal gain, the major bank they work for and who should be supervising them with a need to disguise the level of its own funding costs and above them all, a government seeking to keep borrowing costs down in the middle of a gigantic financial storm. From such alignments of interest are the greatest of conspiracies born.



In my humble opinion, the Libor scandal (which has a LONG way to go before it has played out and which will claim a LOT more scalps) will mark a fundamental change in the treatment of financial conspiracy theories in the media. The sheer amount of coverage it will undoubtedly receive will signal a shift in attitude towards the exposing of such scandals rather than the blind-eyes that have been regularly turned in recent years.
But perhaps, most-of-all, watching how quickly those in high places begin to throw each other under the bus, it will hasten the end of many other possible government conspiracies as exposing such events becomes an exercise in self-preservation. Prime amongst conspiracy theories that may soon be finally proven to be either valid or the figments of overactive imaginations, are those alleged in the gold and silver markets.


The allegations concerning precious metal price manipulation predate those surrounding Libor by decades but until now day they have remained similarly acknowledged within financial circles and ignored without. That may well be about to change.

Unencumbered by liability, the rising price of gold has always been a barometer of governmental failure to protect the purchasing power of fiat currency and the best indication of the damage that inflation does.Forget inexorably rising gold prices. Forget the corrections that shake loose hands from the wheel at every turn. In the broader context they carry far less relevance than the intrinsic values that gold provides a consistent yardstick to.
A look at the value of assets measured in ounces of gold remains the most consistent way to get a sense of their real value and the charts below demonstrate all too clearly the true performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and average US house prices over the long term when measured in gold ounces.
 

If the long-stated claims about government-sanctioned, bank-led manipulation of precious metals markets put forward so eloquently by the likes of Ted Butler, Bill Murphy & Chris Powell at GATA as well as Messrs. Sprott, Sinclair, Davies et al are eventually proven to have any validity whatsoever, the fallout from the Libor scandal will prove to be (to use the words of Jamie Dimon) just another “tempest in a tea pot” as the precious metals are the very underpinnings of the entire global financial system. Conspiracy or no, it would be a blessed relief to get closure no matter what the truth turns out to be.




Oh Snap. Are we really here? If 13 of 16 banks are complicit, how much further statistically is 16 of 16? The answer?  Not far at all.  How crazy will the public response be when this finally goes mainstream? Financial Pandora's Box blowing open in 3.. 2..

Lastly;  Lest anyone forget, people have been talking about the derivatives collapse for quite some time now.  Also:  While this might not be the first time Barclays got caught shit handed, it might be the last.. 

BoE's Tucker Preparing To Self-Immolate... And Take Others Down

Oh shit!  I think the dominoes already started falling!  We could be watching a HUGE scandal accompanying total global financial collapse.  But really, when you think of it, why wouldn't there be a HUGE scandal accompanying said global financial collapse?  Zero Hedge:

Paul Tucker, the Bank of England executive at the center of the Barclays/Diamond trigger-conversation, has issued a statement requesting a Treasury hearing to show his "keenness to clarify the position with regard to the events" of that hanging chad of a phone-call. What is most troublesome (for every major banker and politician) is his apparent willingness to take more down with him. As the M.A.D. escalates, MNI reports that minutes from 2007 show Tucker (who was/is in line as we noted yesterday for the top-job once King leaves next year) was fully aware from the early days of the financial crisis that market participants believed Libor was rigged. The Group’s November 2007 minutes, from a Tucker-chaired meeting, state “Several group members thought that Libor fixings had been lower than actual traded interbank rates through the period of stress.” The minutes show that not only was the issue raised back in November 2007 but that the BOE went to great lengths as the crisis deepened the following year to keep its finger on the money markets’ pulse. It seems that instead of mounting the 'plead-da-fif' defense Tucker is coming all-guns-blazing and is willing to drag more names into this miasma as a suicide-bomb of a hearing where the truth is realized could well bring every high ranking banking official to admit the continued unreality of Libor rates.



If this scandal blows up this week, financial news network viewers will see some epic freakouts:  Some meltdowns will be from guests, others will be from on-air personalities.   Maybe not, though.  This might not be the actual chaos trigger.  That might happen a few weeks or months still down the road.  But whenever it does, when LIBOR and Derivatives actually collapse, you will know.  You won't help but know!

Unregulated global derivatives debt market hits $647 trillion mark

This is what will kill our economy.  Global economy.  So we've got that going for us..  The Extinction Protocol.  Excerpts: 

..Gross Credit Exposure has returned to 2008 levels, something the world might want to pay attention to. Once the lessons of the mistakes of the past are ignored, the risk factor increases proportionally and with Europe teetering on the edge of a Lehman event, the increase in interest rate derivatives might well indicate a new risk that has not been accounted for: A sudden collapse of the Euro currency below the 1.20 or even parity level. Such an event would make Lehman look like a picnic but there is more bad news beyond that as it is not just interest rate derivatives that have increased past 2008 levels as the chart above demonstrates, but some idiots placed bets on the currency markets which means that a collapse of the Euro creates an irreversible game of dominoes and destruction: Unfortunately for us common folk, no one has taken the time to explain the implications of a 10, 20, or even 30% decline in the value of the Euro versus the US Dollar in a compressed time period.

Credit goes where credit is due.. Lifetime Achievement Award!