Remember 2008? Sure you do. That was the year Lehman Brothers went down and we all started hearing about something called “Libor.” No, that’s not a typo for LABOR. It’s LIBOR. It’s the London interbank offer rate, the very short term interest rate that banks use when lending money to each other overnight. And when the Libor became too high there was too much friction in the system. Money stopped flowing from bank to bank. The world economy was in grave danger. Bush and Paulson moved quickly to prevent collapse and the term bailout was suddenly on everyone’s lips.
Libor. How soon we forget. Until this past weekend as the news from London is that the world renowned Barclays has been the target of a multi-year investigation on both sides of the Atlantic, accused of manipulating the Libor during a critical period in the financial melt-down, allegedly to improve its own profits.
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