Barclays

Despite BoE's Tucker telling us this morning that there is no need to look at any other market but LIBOR, it appears the world has moved on from this debacle of indication of anything. As we pointed out here, the 'stability' of LIBOR given everything going on around it is incredulous (whether due to the ECB's crappy-collateral standards-based MROs or the Fed's FX swap lines - since unsecured interbank financing is now a relic of the pre-crisis 'trust' era). Furthermore, as we discussed yesterday, the machinations of the LIBOR market and calculations (which Peter Tchir delves deeply into below) suggest that this not the act of a lone assassin suggesting quite simply that complaining or suing Barclays is redundant - any Libor-related suits (from the public or the government/regulators) must sue all the submitters or it misses the critical facts of the manipulation.

Last week the biggest point of contention in the testimony of Bob Diamond before the House of Commons Treasury Committee was who told him what, and when, with a special circle in hell saved for the BOE's Paul Tucker, who was alleged to have explicitly ordered Barclays to lower its fixing (which as was shown last week had a pretty dramatic impact on the bank's self-reported LIBOR rate). In a few short moments, Tucker himself will be in the hot chair, where an emphasis will be on the emails he sent to Bob Diamond which we presented previously, and whether he acted alone in "nudging" the bank to represent itself as strong than it otherwise would. Watch the full webcast of Tucker's testimony after the jump.

Fed Chairman Bernanke should be impeached if he does not restore Fed surveillance over primary dealers immediately.

With a few hours until BoE's Paul Tucker takes the stand, the venerable institution has finally acquiesced to the Freedom of Information Act request from British MP John Mann and released all copies of emails and transcripts of telephone conversations between Tucker and Bob Diamond between 10/1/08 and 11/30/08. The emails make for some fascinating reading when one considers the sources of the conversation. The thrust of the discussion is Tucker's concern at UK Libor rates being considerably higher than US - especially as US rates were dropping; Tucker's 'shock' at the cost of funding for Barclays' government-guaranteed debt; and finally the explanation/admission for why the BoE's liquidity hosepipe was not fixing the solvency problem in British banks - a lack of eligible collateral. Smoking gun maybe; nail in the coffin of independent Central Banks for sure; hangings in the streets - we are not so sure.

• Euro zone fragmenting faster than EU can act (Reuters)
• Wall Streeters Lose $2 Billion in 401(k) Bet on Own Firms (Bloomberg)
• Eurozone crisis will last for 20 years (FT)
• Chuckie Evans: "Please suh, can I have some moah" (Reuters)
• Quote stuffing and book sales: Amazon ‘robo-pricing’ sparks fears (FT)
• Situation in Egypt getting worse by the minute: Egypt parliament set to meet, defying army (Reuters)
• Chinese goalseek-o-tron speaks: China’s inflation eased to a 29-month low (Bloomberg)
• A contrarian view: "Barclays and the BoE have probably saved the financial system" (FT)
• Flawed analysis: Dealers Declining Bernanke Twist Invitation (BBG) - Actually as shown here, ST Bond holdings have soared as dealers buy what Fed sells: more here
• Obama team targets Romney over taxes, Republicans cry foul (Reuters)
• And all shall be well: Brussels to act over Libor scandal (FT)
• Bank of England's Tucker to testify on rate rigging row (Reuters)

Attempts to manipulate free markets invariably end badly - after all, they are, supposedly, by their very nature, free. Over the past few weeks, the exposure of the Libor-rigging scandal has monopolized the headlines of the financial press. The rather obvious implication being that given almost half the reported inputs that help establish the Libor rate are discarded immediately, Barclays simply CANNOT have manipulated the Libor rate alone. Period. At best this is a cartel, at worst it’s outright fraud on a scale that is completely unprecedented. In Grant Williams' humble opinion, the Libor scandal will mark a fundamental change in the treatment of financial conspiracy theories in the media. The sheer amount of coverage it will undoubtedly receive will signal a shift in attitude towards the exposing of such scandals rather than the blind-eyes that have been regularly turned in recent years. Prime amongst conspiracy theories that may soon be finally proven to be either valid or the figments of overactive imaginations, are those alleged in the gold and silver markets. If the long-stated claims about government-sanctioned, bank-led manipulation of precious metals markets are eventually proven to have any validity whatsoever, the fallout from the Libor scandal will prove to be (to use the words of Jamie Dimon) just another “tempest in a tea pot” as the precious metals are the very underpinnings of the entire global financial system.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that major commercial banks manipulate Libor submissions for their own benefit. As Jefferies David Zervos writes this weekend, money-center commercial banks did not want the “truth” of market prices to determine their loan rates. Rather, they wanted an oligopolistically controlled subjective survey rate to be the basis for their lending businesses. When there are only 16 players – a “gentlemen’s agreement” is relatively easy to formulate. That is the way business has been transacted in the broader OTC lending markets for nearly 30 years. The most bizarre thing to come out of the Barclays scandal, Zervos goes on to say, is the attack on the Bank of England and Paul Tucker. Is it really a scandal that central bank officials tried to affect interest rates? Absolutely NOT! That’s what they do for a living. Central bankers try to influence rates directly and indirectly EVERY day. That is their job. Congresses and Parliaments have given central banks monopoly power in the printing of money and the management of interest rate policy. These same law makers did not endow 16 commercial banks with oligopoly power to collude on the rate setting process in their privately created, over the counter, publicly backstopped marketplaces.

When on Friday news broke that German regulator BAFIN (which is just like the SEC except that it also regulates, investigates and actually prosecutes, instead of just watching porn all day) was launching a probe of the biggest bank in Europe, and actually, make that the world, Germany's Deutsche Bank, the shares took a quick, brisk hit, sliding 5% with everyone anxiously expecting to find out just which bank will follow Barclays into the scapegoat abattoir (because nobody had any clue Liebor manipulation was going on until a week ago). Yet while external inquiry into banks is to be expected (everywhere but in the US of course, because in the US no banks manipulated anything. Ever) as a proactive act on behalf of regulators to cover their back, things get a little more tricky when the bank itself admits there was an obvious supervision problem. From Reuters: "Two Deutsche Bank employees have been suspended after it used external auditors to examine whether staff were involved in manipulating interbank lending rates, German magazine Der Spiegel reported, citing no sources." Now what can possibly go wrong if the biggest bank in the world, with just shy of $3 trillion in "assets", which just happens to have a 1.68% Core Tier 1 ratio, is suddenly thrust smack in the middle of the scandal that the Economist just aptly named the finance industry's "tobacco moment"?

All 3 Libor Arguments Fail

Hundreds of billions of dollars of additional potential legal liability, much of which likely borne by US banks, yet very few are paying attention. Here's how I see it...

In the ongoing reincarnation of Lie-borgate (because as Jon Weil reminds everyone, this is nothing new under the sun, except for a few e-mails, and a bottle of Bollinger), there is just one missing link right about now. From Bloomberg, April 16, 2008:

"It's very important to us that we preserve the integrity of the figures," said Lesley McLeod, a BBA spokeswoman in London. "It's something we have been looking at. If we find that people have been putting in figures which don't reflect accurately their financial figures, the ultimate sanction is to throw them out of the pond.''

And just so there is no confusion, from the NYT, June 6, 2008

The British Bankers Association (BBA) -- which oversees the daily benchmark setting process -- in April announced that it was bringing forward its annual review of the process. It stated that any member found to be deliberately misquoting would be banned.

So: Will the British Bankers' Association now ban Barclays as it said it would? After all, there is all that "integrity" to be preserved.

And in the meantime, not a peep about any bank in the US, which is ironic considering JPM, Citi and BofA are BBA member banks, and had among the lowest fixing rates during the period in question, and as Bob Diamond himself said, "everyone did it." One may almost get the impression that US regulators and politicians, gasp, have a motive to not investigate banks for not only criminal but civil malfeasance. And why should they: after all there is unlimited taxpayer money. And if that ends, the US can just print some more.

Financial magazine Euromoney, which in addition to being a subscription-based publication appears to also rely on bank advertising, has just held its 2012 Awards for Excellence dinner event. And in the "you can't make this up" category we have Barclays winning the Best Global Debt House, Best Investment Bank, And Best Global Flow House Of The Year Awards. Specifically we learn that "the bank’s commitment to the US is exemplified by the addition of another global senior manager to the country – Tom Kalaris is now going to be splitting his time between New York and London as executive chairman of the Americas as well as overseeing wealth management. Jerry del Missier, who has overseen the corporate and investment bank through its Lehman integration and was recently appointed COO of the Barclays group, says the bank is well positioned. "We came out of the crisis in a stronger strategic position and that has allowed us to continue to win market share and build our franchise. Keep in mind that the US is the largest investment banking, wealth management, credit card and investment management market in the world, and in terms of fee share will remain the most dynamic economy in the world for many years. As a strong global, universal bank operating in a competitive environment that is undergoing significant retrenchment, we like our position." That said, with the Chairman, CEO and COO all now fired, just who was it who accepted the various award: the firm's LIBOR setting team? And if so, were they drinking Bollinger at the dinner?

By now the world and their cat knows that Barclays' Lie-bor submissions were 'too high' for the powers that be in Whitehall and we suspect that given any chance or an 'out' to massage the numbers in order to appear stronger) just as they headed into a financing, the Barclays execs figured 'why not?'. For some context on just how much this mattered - quite a significant amount as it turns out - and upon which the basis of many bullish theses were based at the time (despite the fact that CDS markets were gapping wider and screaming reality), Bloomberg's Chart of the Day shows the huge variations from the BBA's LIBOR relative to the UK bank submissions (most notably Barclays) around the time of Paul Tucker's intervention.

But please don’t tell me that you are surprised that Barclays was “manipulating” LIBOR.