The LIBOR interest rate manipulation by Barclays, and various other banks including the Bank of England has a bias toward manipulating rates lower. Low rates feed the speculation that drives the biggest profit centers of the Too Big To Fail (TBTF) banks. Central banks are not independent, but centralized rate setting and money printing institutions created by large banks to serve large banks and they engage in the bias toward lower rates. Ostensibly, central banks fill the role of 'lender of last resort.' In fact, central banks are now the primary lender to large banks -- at zero percent interest -- with the role of 'lender of last resort' now being played by savers and pensioners whose accounts are being drained as interest rates are manipulated lower.
The banking lobby misrepresents the situation in two ways. First, they foster the belief that the economy needs lower rates to 'get going.' Second, the banking lobby likes to pretend that there is no alternative. In the first case, lower rates -- by and large -- have the effect of lowering the value of a country's currency and destroys its purchasing power and this drags the economy down. In the second case, we do have an alternative. A perfect example is the Burnley Savings and Loans in the U.K. run by Dave Fishwick, an entrepreneur who got tired of the lies and deceit at the big banks and decided to open his own.
At Dave's bank, pensioners earn 5 percent on their money while small business borrowers pay 8.9 percent to 14.9 percent a year interest. That's it. That's his business plan. And of course it works because there is a huge spread between what depositors are making and the rate at which loans are made. This is all banking was ever meant to be. Anybody in fact can do it. It's one of the easiest businesses in the world. And yet for some reason banking has, for the TBTF crowd, become a failure. Why? Because that massive spread is not enough for the management of banks like Barclays and JP Morgan. They want more and they are willing to take big risks (with our money) to make more for themselves. And when their risky bets don't pay off, they are able to shuttle the liability onto the balance sheet of the Federal government, who in turn must impose increasingly more draconian austerity measures to pay off the bad bets. This is what is meant by Too Big To Fail. Too big to suffer any consequences for making bad business decisions. Too big for any genuine, impartial accountability. Too big to play by the rules. Too big to pay a competitive rate of interest on savings.
Burnley Savings and Loans pays 5 percent on savings with no problem. And this proves we are all getting 90 percent (or more) less than we should be getting on our savings and pensions -- as interest income that would ordinarily be going into the pockets of retirees and savers -- gets channeled onto the balance sheets of TBTF banks to cover losing bets. This is at the heart of the LIBOR manipulation fraud; institutionalized fleecing of savers on behalf of speculators who use their ill gotten gains to lobby governments to make it easier to manipulate markets to fleece us even more.
Similarly, programs like Quantitative Easing in the U.S. and U.K. are nothing more than interest rate manipulation schemes too; employed to pry income from savers and pensioners and redirect that money into the pockets of the TBTF banks.
So why don't have we have more Dave Fishwick's opening honest banks paying 5 percent on savings? Because the TBTF banks have used that lobbying money they pilfered from our savings to get laws passed to set up barriers to prevent any competition coming along. Mr. Fishwick is working through 8,000 pages of forms to comply with 'regulations' that seem only to apply to banks offering competitive rates on savings and loans while the TBTF banks simply bypass all regulation, all codes of ethics, and all common decency as they continue to drain the economy of all its savings to pay off bad bets made by the unscrupulous gamblers that run the TBTF banks.
[KR311] Keiser Report: Fraud & 60 Orgasms
We discuss why nobody is freaking about LIBOR in America, while JP Morgan caught doing an Enron on U.S. energy markets and GlaxoSmithKline pays 10 percent of their ill-gotten gains for bribing doctors and scientists across America. In the second half of the show Max talks to Kevin Sara of the TuNur solar export project of Tunisia about solar exports from the Middle East and toxic derivatives exports from the City of London.