It seems likely, according to a new G-20 report.
From Rowena Mason and Emma Rowley of the London Telegraph:
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.
Oh fercrissakes!
Look, it’s safe to assume these days that anything that could be rigged by banksters was rigged by banksters.
When you throw out the possibility of eight- and nine-figure bonuses for folks who produce the right numbers, then you have to assume that they’ll do their damnedest to come up with the right numbers.
Banksters are wiseguys with a better test in clothing and memberships in all the right clubs. It really is that simple.
And let’s face it: How many us us could resist the temptation to be wealthier than any monarch of yore just by jiggering a decimal place here or there?
Enough is enough. It’s time to end the tyranny of Wall Street and The City before the slick-haired Armani-suited, Gucci-clad criminal class dooms us all to servitude or death by austerity.
AMEN! OH! The banksters who have done this need to be in a dungeon offshore of course, way off shore!!!! With the other sharks.