Go Directly to Jail. Do Not ...

... Pass Go. Do Not Collect £200 ($200 on the USA monopoly game).

Unlike the Banker in the game of Monopoly, our real world UK Bankers are never given the "Go To Jail" card, they are allowed to operated cartels (Libor scandal), payment-protection insurance, interest-rates swaps, just three banking obscenities where the little people were screwed ....

... and the new UK financial policeman says :

repent or go to jail

... this is extreme bullshit, the word should have been :

I'll see each and every scumbag in jail !

... he did mouth a few words of truth :

"... truth is that if our supermarkets in this country, if John Lewis, operated in a way that banks do, they wouldn't have any customers," he said. 

Martin Wheatley, head of the new Financial Conduct Authority, has the right pedigree to clean up the dogs mess called the City of London, but how many politicians will stand with him, how many will cave into pressure from bankers and others who need to be able to cheat the little people of the UK and those other countries that rely on our financial institutions, and  will he have sufficient staff to police the labyrinth of our financial and dealing services.

... myself, I believe the financial services are too close to politics, an unnatural relationship ... remember an earlier post ...

"the dominant economic interests in capitalist society can normally count on the active good will and support of those in whose hands state power lies."

... and that from a politician !

Contrite or what !

"We will apologise, acknowledge these mistakes, answer for our actions and give our absolute commitment to fixing what went wrong."

... a commitment to change,possibly, but how long before it all happens once again.


Another banking scandal, this time HSBC has been caught with its corporate trousers (pants in the USA) around its ankles over :

... a report into HSBC, released ahead of a Senate hearing on Tuesday, that says huge sums of Mexican drug money almost certainly passed through the bank.

This is another case of "compliance gone wrong", I read recently ...

"We did our best, the right boxes were ticked, how could we know?"

Is 21st century compliance more about giving cover from culpability than rooting out bad behaviour ?

... could it be that compliance in banking should be an external organisation.


For those who hold Adam Smith in high regard I humbly remind you of these words :

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

• Book I, Chapter X, Part II, p 152

... a great mind with a crystal ball tuned into 21st century markets.

The FBI will heed the ...

... man within, "one's conscience", whilst the British Government will sit on its hands and fail the people from all over the world.

Guided by its very un-civil service, government breasts will be beaten, sackcloth and ashes worn as a public display of contriteness by bankers, but at the end of this sorry affair unless the police arrest those responsible for fixing the LIBOR rates, and those who supervised the fixing, and those who turned a blind eye to the activities of these thieves.

... and those at the very top, nothing will change !  They rely on false compliance ...

Compliance is much more about giving senior management, and the regulators where they exist, cover from culpability than rooting out bad behaviour. “We did our best, the right boxes were ticked, how could we know?” they are able to say.

... that is not compliance, its a comfort blanket for the complicit.

We need rendition of every one of those involved in this scandal, to the only commonwealth that has both the will and the teeth to send a message of worth to the bankers throughout the world that there is "nowhere to hide".  To do this Britain need Uncle Sam like never before.

And because the British Government is a gutless body when addressing issues of morality and ethics amongst its own, and for Bankers read the Bank of England read British Government (of every flavour), people turn to the champion of law and order in the USA, the FBI.  It is time to repay those little people who rarely ask for favours, help clean this cesspit of banking criminal who laugh at the law, people without a conscience, people who cheated every little person with a bank account ...

... and in Europe ... France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, and the other countries that have banking links with London, you have been affected by the scum of LIBOR, its time the call to fix this scandal of morality and ethics was pan-European ......

Every Brit needs the FBI, because ...

... our Government is not going to remove banking criminals from society, prosecute them, and place them behind bars, as an example to others that crime will not pay, for at least 30 years.

The Sunday Times writers Iain Dey, Oliver Shah and Karl West write today ...

FBI probes Barclays rates traders.

Libor scandal widens as Americans pursue criminal investigations and RBS sacks 10 dealers linked to plot.

FOURTEEN Barclays traders at the centre of the global market-fixing scandal are being investigated by the FBI, America’s top criminal investigation agency. 

Agents at the FBI’s Washington headquarters are conducting an inquiry into the group accused last week by regulators of conspiring to rig international interest rates. 

Barclays was last week fined £290m by regulators in America and Britain after admitting its role in fixing the rates at which banks lend to each other — known as Libor and Euribor — between 2005 and 2009. 

Although the settlement deal ensures the bank is no longer under investigation, the agreement did not extend to the unnamed traders - who are believed to have been based mostly in London and New York. 

The Serious Fraud Office is also conducting an inquiry into the individuals. However, senior financial investigators said that the Americans have greater scope to bring a case to court. The FBI could attempt to extradite any Britons involved in the affair to America if it finds there is a case to answer.
The Libor-rigging investigation extends to 20 of the world’s biggest banks, including Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Citigroup. HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group are also involved.
Regulators and criminal investigators on three continents are examining traders’ activities. RBS has fired about 10 staff as a result. Dozens of bankers at other institutions have been sacked or suspended.
Libor and Euribor are the benchmark rates used to price more than £300 trillion of financial products, from credit cards and mortgages to complex financial derivatives. 

In the run- up to the financial crisis, traders are said to have attempted to manipulate the rates to boost their bonuses or protect their jobs. At the peak of the financial crisis, they artificially lowered rates to disguise the stress on the banks’ balance sheets. 

Barclays is the first bank to strike a deal in an attempt to bring an end to the affair. It blew the whistle on its own traders and agreed to settle at an early stage in exchange for a 30% cut in financial punishment. 

The revelations have left Barclays’ chief executive, Bob Diamond, fighting for his job and provoked fresh anger about City greed. David Cameron called for senior bankers to “take responsibility for the actions” while Vince Cable, the business secretary, said the nation needed to clean up “a massive cesspit in the banking system”. 

Demands are mounting for a full public inquiry into banking ethics and standards. Diamond and Marcus Agius, chairman of Barclays, will face the Commons’ Treasury committee this week. Diamond is expected to push blame towards other banks — and the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the regulator. 

Barclays executives raised concerns about potential manipulation of Libor four years ago, at the peak of the financial crisis. Documents released by the FSA last week quote emails from the bank’s staff stating that the regulator believed manipulating Libor “seems sensible” given the extreme stresses in the financial markets at the time. 

According to the FSA last week, the bank’s submitters — staff who compiled its borrowing rates — thought the Bank of England condoned the practice of tweaking the numbers downwards. This was because of a misunderstanding as senior management passed commands down, the FSA said.
It is unclear how much Diamond knew at the time. Andrew Tyrie, the chairman of the Treasury committee, is expected to focus on this in his questioning. 

Several Barclays investors rallied to Diamond’s defence. One top 20 shareholder said: “By the time this chapter of history is written, I suspect there will be other banks that will have got far bigger fines.”
Diamond is “still sufficiently critical to the running of large swaths of this business that to throw him overboard would be to the detriment of shareholders”, the investor added. 

Agius is also under pressure to resign. Some shareholders are still upset with his handling of a row over a £ 5.7m payment to Diamond to cover a tax bill. Investors will not push for his exit immediately to avoid destabilising the bank further. 

Some shareholders are said to want Agius to be replaced by Sir Mike Rake, BT’s chairman and Barclays’ senior independent director. 

Chuka Umunna, shadow business secretary, urged Agius to quit as chairman of the British Bankers’ Association, which compiles Libor. Bob Diamond is Britain’s most hated banker. If the rankings were ever in doubt, the tsunami of opprobrium that washed over the Barclays chief executive last week confirmed his status as public enemy No1.

A big thank you to the FBI ... you might like to make an application to extradite the scum today lest they disappear from the radar, and you need to question the men and women at the top of the fraudulent banking organisations !

Bankers offer to give up their bonus ...

... they should be relieved of their freedom.

The story can be read in full here.

Regulators in Europe, the US and Asia have said that investigations into other banks are "ongoing", those people responsible for manipulating markets should be gaoled for life, this pond life ruin the lives of the little people.

Our  Financial Services Authority are not fit for purpose, if Tracey McDermott, director of enforcement thinks that a corporate fine, that would be extracted from those very same customers the banks screwed, is sufficient she lives in a la-la land, gaol is the only outcome for all those involved.

This is another example of the rottenness that should be cut out from society.

I am looking to the USA for a lead, the UK regulaters are far too close to the problem for me to be comfortable with an ethical outcome, only in the USA do perpetrators receive an adequate punishment.

... in 1066 began the ...

... rape of Britain, a millennium later the Norman yoke might still be detected, not a mailed fist behind the walls of a motte-and-bailey castle, but the iron fist in a velvet glove wielded behind the closed doors of governance. William the Bastard is long gone, but cold calculating Britain keeps a virtual yoke that can still be felt around the necks of the peoples of our lands, and probably all the lands that make our world;  this yoke has been adopted by a new aristocracy, an aristocracy that seems to encompass a multitude of disciplines.


At Westminster our political leaders have come out of their particular closet to impose a fiscal discipline as harsh as the discipline of medieval Britain, not a land that executed people for quite minor crimes or mutilate them and then let them go because it was cheaper than prison, but a land that imposes penalties upon the weakest in society, those without a collective voice.  It is the disadvantaged that will pay the price of the failure of those who led our societies into the abyss of ruin predicted to last a generation.



This leadership is not restricted to Westminster and its closeted (un)civil servants, it cascades down through the devolved administrations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the single most important consideration of politics is their succession, peoples who trust politics to ....

... establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, ...  (We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, ... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.)

... must look to themselves for the future because politics is in perpetual failure, the proof of this failure is with the "pork barrel" politics of a world wide self appointed political elite that has brought the world to its knees.  In Britain today the political elite is part of a 21st century aristocracy that includes bankers, the media, and a very small group of industrialists from all corners of the world.

In 54 years time exactly a thousand years will have passed since the Norman invasion of England, this half a century is sufficient time to drive a stake through the heart of inequality, to create that domestic tranquillity,to organise an equitable welfare for all the peoples, and to establish liberty as a fundamental right for every person.

How to create this land of equality is the most difficult question of all, the first bastion of inequality to attack must surly be "influence", no interest group should be allowed to dominate our lives, to this end I would propose that our elections should be a proportionate system that promotes the wishes of the electorate to government, no longer should a minority of voters promote a minority dictatorship to Westminster.

In tandem with proportionality all correspondence with and by those in government, no matter what media is used, should become the property of the electorate, published in full, a failure to comply would be regarded as a heinous crime against democracy.

Media ownership should be restricted to a single publication by a single organisation or person, no longer would it be considered appropriate for "media moguls" to exist; government ownership of media should be outlawed, not including public interest broadcasting which should be a-political, reportage only, the very existence of the BBC in its multitude of guises should be destroyed in favour of a multitude of independent organisations dependent on the direct patronage of its viewers.

No bank should be too big to fail, and these banks should be wholly owned by shareholdings restricted to the peoples of Britain, no longer should people external to the effects of our banking system be able to influence the governance of these institutions. 

Taxation should have no exceptions, there might be an allowance before taxes were collected but this would be the only exception, every penny of earnings made within our borders should be taxed in full, no exceptions.  The rule that "if you wish to sell it here then make it here and be taxed" should have no exceptions.  Taxation should also be equitable and graduated, those who take most from society should be expected to give most.

UK Chancellor George Osborne ...

 ... is right to rejects Europe’s "idiotic" banking deal, a Times report shared below ...

Britain’s relationship with Brussels took another hit last night after George Osborne refused to sign up to watered-down capital requirements for banks that he said could make him “look like an idiot”.

The Chancellor’s comments came as European finance ministers attempted to reach agreement on how to implement Basel III rules that require banks to raise their core tier one capital — a measure of financial strength — to 7 per cent by 2019. Mr Osborne wants to toughen up the EU’S interpretation of the rules, which he says could include loopholes to let some banks in Europe sidestep capital buffer levels. He also wants the freedom to impose higher capital buffers without the need for European permission in order to avoid another financial crisis.

“We are not implementing the Basel agreement, as anyone who will look at this text will be able to tell you,” he said. “I am not prepared to go out there and say something that is going to make me look like an idiot five minutes later.

“People will listen to what I say . . . I represent the largest financial centre in Europe. You have got to allow me to sit down and go through the issues. You have not done that.”

The bad-tempered exchange comes months after David Cameron vetoed a European Union fiscal treaty. 

Michel Barnier, the EU commissioner in charge of financial regulation, suggested that Mr Osborne was looking for an effective opt-out with a proposal that would let Britain impose higher capital ratios than elsewhere in Europe.

Some on the Continent are worried that higher capital levels in Britain could put European institutions at a disadvantage because deposits and other business may be attracted to the UK if it was perceived by investors as being safer.

Mr Osborne rejected Mr Barnier’s theory. “I am not asking for some UK carve out. I will not be painted as somehow anti-european, demanding something especially for London,” he said.

One compromise that was offered suggested that Britain and Sweden, which also has a big financial sector relative to its overall economy, would have the option to tack on a capital buffer, but EU constraints on the decision making would remain. ........... in full £here

My preference is for a stronger banking system that is never again too big to fail and is viewed by the world as first rate, no compromises with the EU please Osborne, just look at the mess they created with the failing Euro.