533 Not only Barclays: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, UBS and RBS implicated in Rate fixing scandal

Not only Barclays: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, UBS and RBS
implicated in Rate fixing scandal

(1) Rate fixing scandal implicates Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, UBS
and RBS
(2) Marcus Agius resigns as Barclays' Chairman. 2009 Wikipedia said born
Jewish; 2012 Wikipedia says Catholic
(3) Wikipedia 2009 says Marcus Agius "a Roman Catholic", married
Rothschild daughter
(4) Wikipedia 2009 says Marcus Agius "born into a Jewish family"
(5) Rothschild Family Tree - from Exbury Gardens link
(6) Cozy club that sets the Libor interest rate: cossetted by Wall St,
but exposed by Britain
(7) Trans Pacific Partnership: Corporate 1% strategy to dis-empower
Governments

(1) Rate fixing scandal implicates Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, UBS
and RBS

http://rt.com/business/news/barclays-fines-chief-scandal-198/

More fines to follow in rate fixing case

Published: 02 July, 2012, 16:18

The UK financial watchdog has warned there is more to come in rate
fixing scandal. This follows the resignation of the Barclay’s Chairman,
the first bank to be caught out.

"I wish I could say this [Barclay’s] was an isolated case… You will hear
more on this in due course," the Financial Services Authority acting
director of enforcement, Tracey McDermott said.

Last week American and British regulators imposed a $450 million fine on
Barclay’s for providing false figures on borrowing rates between 2005
and 2009, which affected corporate loans, inflation swaps, mortgages and
currencies.

The UK Chancellor George Osborne said on Friday the FSA’s continuing
investigation “concerns a number of institutions both based in the UK
and overseas”. “But it is already clear that the FSA’s investigation
demonstrates systemic failures at the heart of the financial system at
the time,” Osborne added.

Now more than a dozen major banks, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase,
HSBC, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland, are under the microscope of
authorities in the US, Europe and Japan.

The involvement of Barclay’s in the rate fixing scandal has already seen
its shares plummet 15%, and resulted in calls for the management team to
quit. On Monday Barclay’s Chairman Marcus Agius stepped down, saying the
scandal dealt "a devastating blow" to the bank's reputation. The “buck
stops with me, and I must acknowledge responsibility by standing aside,”
Agius said in a statement.

Meanwhile Barclay’s CEO Bob Diamond has been under pressure to quit. He
said he’s giving up his annual bonus, but showed no intention of resigning.

COMMENT

Billy Spudd (unregistered) July 03, 2012, 08:29

Bob Diamond (a hidden Jew - Ashkenazi) and Marcus Aigus (married to a
Rothschild) are just a part of the Zionist cabal that got caught in
their own thieving financial mechanizations. Every time one of these
vermin gets caught, everyone pretends 'it isn't a Jewish thing'. Well,
yes it is, if EVER TIME there is a financial scandal involving Mafioso
cabalisitic conspiracies to defraud entire nations and Jewish characters
are feature prominently, yes it is a Jewish conspiracy.

Now, according to the BBC, which of course, steadfastly pretends Diamond
isn't Jewish, has reported that Diamond will blow the whistle on
government corruption if he is put on trial. Fine! Excellent! That is
EXACTLY what decent people want...the exposure of how Zionist and
Cabalists have secrectly corrupted those who were sworn to protect their
nation's interest. For once, let Great Britain show the true mettle it
once had and expose all these sleezy bandits and vermin for what they are.

(2) Marcus Agius resigns as Barclays' Chairman. 2009 Wikipedia said born
Jewish; 2012 Wikipedia says Catholic

http://inagist.com/all/220148468004556800/

Marcus Agius just resigned as Barclays' Chairman. In 2009 Wikipedia said
he was born into a Jewish family; today it says he's Roman Catholic

(3) Wikipedia 2009 says Marcus Agius "a Roman Catholic", married
Rothschild daughter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Agius

Marcus Ambrose Paul Agius (born 22 July 1946)[2] is a British financier
and businessman, currently the Group Chairman of Barclays, although it
was announced on 2 July 2012 that he was to resign from this
position.[3] He also serves on the BBC's new executive board as a senior
non-executive director.[4] ...

[edit] Personal life

Marcus, a Roman Catholic,[11] married Katherine (born 1949), daughter of
Edmund de Rothschild of the Rothschild banking family of England and has
a close involvement with the Rothschild family estate, Exbury Gardens in
Hampshire. They have two children.[citation needed] He is also a
passionate gardener and art collector.[12] ...

This page was last modified on 7 July 2012 at 15:05.

(4) Wikipedia 2009 says Marcus Agius "born into a Jewish family"

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marcus_Agius&oldid=261476452

Marcus Agius

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 81.129.156.184 (talk)
at 16:49, 2 January 2009. It may differ significantly from the current
revision.

Marcus Ambrose Paul Agius (born 22 July 1946) is a British financier and
businessman, currently the Chairman of Barclays. He has also been
appointed the senior non-executive director on the BBC's new executive
board.

He was educated at St George's College, Weybridge, and gained an MA at
Trinity Hall, Cambridge in Mechanical Sciences and Economics. In
addition, he has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Agius has been a non-executive Director of Barclays since 1 September
2006, and succeeded Matthew Barrett as Chairman from 1 January 2007. He
was previously chairman of the London branch of investment bank Lazard
and non-executive chairman of BAA Limited.

Born into a Jewish family, Agius is married to Katherine (born 1949),
daughter of Edmund de Rothschild of the Rothschild banking family of
England, with two children, and has a close involvement with the
Rothschild family estate, Exbury Gardens in Hampshire.

External links
Biography at BAA plc
Family tree

(5) Rothschild Family Tree - from Exbury Gardens link
The link to Family Tree, ie Rothschild Family Tree, in the 2009 webpage,
no longer works. It was at
http://www.exbury.co.uk/exbury/rothschildstree.htm but has been deleted;
however, it is archived (get it before it's gone) at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030819060814/http://www.exbury.co.uk/exbury/rothschildstree.htm

(6) Cozy club that sets the Libor interest rate: cossetted by Wall St,
but exposed by Britain
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/business/barclays-case-opens-a-window-on-wall-st-fair-game.html

The British, at Least, Are Getting Tough

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: July 7, 2012

THE unfolding story of how Barclays — and, in all likelihood, other big
banks — rigged interest rates is full of telling tidbits about the way
Wall Street works. It also represents yet another teachable moment.

By now the world knows that Barclays manipulated the most widely used
benchmark rate, the London interbank offered rate. But Barclays is just
one member of the cozy club that sets the Libor, which is supposed to be
based on the average rate at which large banks can borrow money
overnight. It’s not based on actual transactions, however — and that
leaves room for mischief.

And mischief there was, according to e-mails and other documents that
Barclays has turned over to regulators in the United States and Britain.
The upshot: traders colluded by posting rates that either helped their
bets in the markets or their bank’s perceived financial strength during
the harrowing days of 2008.

Manipulating the Libor is a big deal because it affects the cost of
money for almost everyone. The Libor is used to set rates on mortgages,
credit cards and all manner of loans, personal and commercial. The
amount of money affected by the phony rates is at least $500 trillion,
British regulators have estimated.

Barclays is not the only bank under investigation for rigging the Libor.
It was simply the first to own up to the behavior and settle with
regulators, paying $450 million. Other banks will almost certainly
follow, and the documents bound to bubble up in those cases will surely
prove fascinating.

One of the most revealing exchanges in the Barclays documents came when
a bank official tried to describe why Barclays’s improper postings were
not as problematic as those of other banks. “We’re clean but we’re
dirty-clean, rather than clean-clean,” an executive said in a phone
conversation. Talk about defining deviancy down.

“Dirty clean” versus “clean clean” pretty much sums up Wall Street’s
view of cheating. If everybody does it, nobody should be held
accountable if caught. Alas, many United States regulators and
prosecutors seem to have bought into this argument.

British authorities have not. Last week’s defenestrations of Marcus
Agius, the Barclays chairman; Robert E. Diamond Jr., its hard-charging
chief executive; and Jerry del Missier, its chief operating officer,
apparently occurred at the behest of the Bank of England and the
Financial Services Authority, the nation’s top securities regulator.
(Mr. del Missier also seems to have lost his post as chairman of the
Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the big Wall
Street lobbying group. His name vanished last week from the list of
board members on the group’s Web site.)

MR. DIAMOND seemed shocked to be pushed out. An American by birth, he
probably thought he’d be subject to American rules of engagement when
confronted with evidence of wrongdoing at his bank. You know how it
works on this side of the Atlantic: faced with a scandal, most chief
executives jettison low-level employees, maybe give up a bonus or two —
and then ride out the storm. Regulators, if they act, just extract fines
from the shareholders.

British officials are taking a different approach with this scandal.
George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, was direct in his
assessment of Barclays’s activities. “It is clear that what happened in
Barclays and potentially other banks was completely unacceptable, was
symptomatic of a financial system that elevated greed above all other
concerns and brought our economy to its knees,” he said in a statement
on June 28. “Punish wrongdoing. Right the wrong of the age of
irresponsibility.”

Later, in a speech to Parliament, Mr. Osborne voiced the question that
so many have asked recently in the United States. “Fraud is a crime in
ordinary business — why shouldn’t it be so in banking?” he asked.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the Libor scandal is how dangerous it is
to rely on interested parties to set interest rates or prices of
financial instruments, rather than on actual transactions conducted by
investors. The Libor has been set in the current and vulnerable manner
since the late 1960s. Maybe it has never been rigged before, but who knows?

It is far better to have the transparent and verifiable record of prices
created by a tape of electronic trading. Such records are standard
pricing mechanisms for many securities. But not all.

Prices of derivatives, especially credit default swaps that trade
one-to-one, can still be based on one dealer’s say-so. That’s why a rule
proposed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that would require
pretrade price transparency in the swaps market is so important.

But it is also why Wall Street is pushing back, especially on the
commission’s proposal that swap execution facilities provide market
participants, before they buy or sell, with easily accessible prices on
“a centralized electronic screen.” The commission’s rule would eliminate
the one-to-one dealings by telephone that are so lucrative to traders
and so expensive to investors.

A bill intended to gut the commission’s proposed rule and to maintain
dealers’ profits in derivatives failed to go anywhere after being passed
last year by two committees in the House of Representatives — Financial
Services and Agriculture. That was a good thing.

But there are rumblings in Washington that this bill has resurfaced and
that it may be quietly attached to a House Agriculture Committee
appropriations bill scheduled for a vote this month. The bill, if
passed, would bar the requirement for a centralized pricing platform to
shed light on the enormous swaps market. It would also prevent
regulators from requiring that a number of participants provide price
quotations to customers, a way to ensure fairness.

It’s hard to believe, in the wake of the Libor mess, that Wall Street
and its supporters in Congress would continue to battle against price
transparency in any market. Then again, that’s precisely what they did
after the credit crisis.

With each new financial imbroglio, the gulf widens between Main Street’s
opinion of Wall Street and the industry’s view of itself. When Mr. del
Missier, the former Barclays chief operating officer, took over as
chairman of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association
last November, he said: “We will continue to work on maintaining and
burnishing the level of confidence investors have in our markets, in our
own financial institutions, and in the general economic outlook for the
future.”

Given the Libor scandal, let’s just say good luck with that.

(7) Trans Pacific Partnership: Corporate 1% strategy to dis-empower
Governments

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/07/02/trans-pacific-partnership-corporate-escape-from-accountability/

Trans Pacific Partnership: Corporate Escape From Accountability

July 2, 2012

Information has been leaked about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP),
which is being negotiated in secret by US Trade Representative Ron Kirk.
Six hundred corporate “advisors” are in on the know, but not Congress or
the media. Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate trade subcommittee that has
jurisdiction over the TPP, has not been permitted to see the text or to
know the content.

The TPP has been called a “one-percenter” power tool. The agreement
essentially abolishes the accountability of foreign corporations to
governments of countries with which they trade. Indeed, the agreement
makes governments accountable to corporations for costs imposed by
regulations, including health, safety and environmental regulations. The
agreement gives corporations the right to make governments pay them for
the cost of complying with the regulations of government. One wonders
how long environmental, labor, and financial regulation can survive when
the costs of compliance are imposed on the taxpayers of countries and
not on the economic activity that results in spillover effects such as
pollution.

Many will interpret the TPP as another big step toward the establishment
of global government in the New World Order. However, what the TPP
actually does is to remove corporations or the spillover effects of
their activities from the reach of government. As the TPP does not
transfer to corporations the power to govern countries, it is difficult
to see how it leads to global government. The real result is global
privilege of the corporate class as a class immune to government regulation.

One of the provisions allows corporations to avoid the courts and laws
of countries by creating a private tribunal that corporations can use to
sue governments for the costs of complying with regulation. Essentially,
the laws of countries that apply to corporations are supplanted by
decisions of a private tribunal of corporate lawyers.

The TPP is open to all countries. Currently, it is being negotiated
between the US, Australia, Brunei, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam,
Chile, and Peru. Australia, according to reports, has refused to submit
to the private tribunal system.

What are we to make of the TPP? It is perhaps too early to have all the
answers. However, I can offer some ways of thinking about it.

I doubt that the TPP is a New World Order takeover. If anything, the TPP
reduces the scope of global government by exempting corporations from
government control. Also, global government, unless it is government by
the American Empire, is inconsistent with the neoconservatives
insistence on US hegemony over the world. Powerful US ideological,
private, and government interest groups have no intention of losing the
power that they have acquired by being rolled into some New World Order
unless the New World Order is a euphemism for American Empire.

In the criticisms of the TPP, much emphasis is placed on the costs that
corporations of foreign members of the agreement can impose on the US.
However, US corporations gain the same privileges over those countries,
as the agreement gives every country’s corporations immunity to the
other countries’ laws.

It could be the case that US corporations believe that their penetration
of the other countries will greatly exceed the activities in the US of
Brunei, New Zealand, Peru, et al. However, once Japan, Canada, China and
others join TPP, the prospect of American firms getting more out of the
agreement than foreign firms disappears, unless from the US perspective
the definition of foreign firm includes US corporations that offshore
the production of the goods and services that they market in the US. If
this is the case, then US offshoring firms would be exempt not only from
the laws and courts of foreign countries, but also exempt from the laws
and courts of the US.

This point is possibly moot as the agreement requires all governments
that are parties to the TPP to harmonize their laws so that the new
corporate privileges are equally reflected in every country. To avoid
discriminatory law against a country’s own corporations that do not
engage in foreign trade, harmonization could mean that domestic
corporations would be granted the same privileges as foreign investors.
If not, domestic firms might acquire the privileges by setting up a
foreign subsidiary consisting of an office.

As the TPP is clearly an agreement being pushed by US corporations, the
implication is that US corporations see it as being to their relative
advantage. However, it is unclear what this advantage is.

Alternatively, TPP is a strategy for securing exemption from regulation
under the guise of being a trade agreement.

Another explanation, judging from the unusual collection of the initial
parties to the agreement, is that the agreement is part of Washington’s
strategy of encircling China with military bases, as the US has done to
Russia. One would have thought that an agreement of such path-breaking
nature would have begun with Japan, S. Korea, and Philippines. However,
these countries are already part of China’s encirclement. Brunei,
Singapore, New Zealand, and especially Vietnam would be valuable
additions. Are the special privileges that Washington is offering these
countries part of the bribe to become de facto outposts of American Empire?

Yet another explanation is that Ron Kirk is caught up in the
deregulatory mindset that began with the repeal of Glass-Steagall and
financial deregulation. If financial markets know best and are
self-regulating, requiring no government interference, then so also are
other markets and businesses.

Free market economists view regulations as “takings.” The argument is
that regulations take corporate property–profits, for example, by making
corporations comply with health, safety, and environmental
regulation–just as government takes private property when it builds or
widens a road. Therefore, corporations should be compensated for takings
that result from regulation. As the argument goes, if government wants
corporations to protect the environment, the government should pay the
corporations for the cost of doing so. This argument gets rid of
“external costs” or “social costs”–costs that corporations impose on
others and future generations by the pollution and exhaustion of natural
resources, for example. The argument turns social costs into
compensation for takings.

The TPP is likely serving many agendas. As we learn more, the motives
behind the TPP will become clearer. From my perspective as an economist
and former member of government, the problem with Ron Kirk’s TPP is that
the agreement is constructed to serve private, not public interests.
Kirk is a public official charged with serving and protecting the public
interest. Yet, he has conspired in secret with private interests to
produce a document that exempts private corporations from public
accountability.

There is a paradox here. While financial corporations and now all
corporations are being made independent of government, US citizens have
lost the protection of law and are now subject to being detained
indefinitely or murdered without due process of law. Corporations gain
an unimaginable freedom while citizens lose all freedom and the rights
that define their freedom. Similarly, foreign countries, which as
members of TPP can be exempt from US law, are subject to “pre-emptive”
US violation of their air space and borders by drones and troops sent in
to assassinate some suspected terrorist, but which also kill citizens of
those countries who are merely going about their normal business.

Perhaps one way to understand TPP is that the US government is now
extending its own right to be lawless to corporations. Just as the US
government today is only answerable to itself, the TPP makes
corporations answerable only to themselves.

Public Citizen’s analysis of TPP can be found here:
http://www.citizen.org/documents/Leaked-TPP-Investment-Analysis.pdf and
the leaked document here:
http://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tppinvestment.pdf