zmetro.com

The Telegraph:

An anonymous insider from one of Britain’s biggest lenders – aside from Barclays – explains how he and his colleagues helped manipulate the UK’s bank borrowing rate. Neither the insider nor the bank can be identified for legal reasons.

It was during a weekly economic briefing at the bank in early 2008 that I first heard the phrase. A sterling swaps trader told the assembled economists and managers that “Libor was dislocated with itself”. It sounded so nonsensical that, at first, it just confused everyone, and provoked a little laughter.



Before long, though, I was drawing up presentations to explain the “dislocation of Libor from itself” for corporate relationship managers. I was deciphering the subject in emails, internally and externally. And I was using the phrase myself openly with customers of the bank.



What I was explaining was that the bank was manipulating Libor. Only I didn’t see it like that at the time.

Jonathan Ford:

For a country that constantly extols the virtues of its large and prosperous financial sector, Britain can sometimes seem curiously inept at providing basic banking services.

This is not just a question of the everyday niggles that irk the average high-street banking customer: the monstrous charges levied on simple products, for instance, or the seemingly endless wait to get through to operatives at remote call-centres. There is also the rolling barrage of mis-selling scandals. The latest involved banks selling duff derivatives to their business customers. And to this “plain vanilla” malpractice has now been added a subgenre of even subtler scams, such as Barclays’ tweaking of the London interbank offered rate – a key interest rate for banks.