From Paul Jay of The Real News Network, an interview with Stephany Griffith Jones is the Financial Markets Director, Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University on the LIBOR rigging scandal:
An excerpt:
[The] LIBOR rate determines contracts on derivatives, where banks can be on either side of the game. So it might have been convenient at a particular time for them to lower the rate and at other times to increase the rate. I mean, this is in the first phase of the crisis, when they were doing this manipulation purely for short-term gain. And this is a really quite—completely unacceptable that they should be raising the interest rates that, say, the city of Baltimore had to pay, or that the 900,000 mortgage holders that are affected by LIBOR in the United States had to pay, or that some poor developing countries make in borrowing on a major international loan, just so some traders in London and in the city of London and in Wall Street can make some outrageous profits. I mean, we cannot run the world economy on this basis. And that’s why ordinary people are outraged, especially because this is not the first scandal that we’ve heard.
The full transcript is posted online here.
