From James Corbett writing in Saturday's International Forecaster:

"What do you get when you cross a banker and a gangster? A bankster, of course. The temptation might be to think of this as colorful hyperbole, but it's not. Exactly as the gangsters of old colluded to buy off the regulators, rub out the competition, and swindle the public, so too do the big banks cheat, steal, lie and swindle to support their corrupt practices. Although there is no dearth of evidence to support this thesis, this week was particularly ripe with examples of just how the banksters run their racket."

"The biggest news, of course, was the unraveling of the Libor lie. Even more amazing than the scandal itself is the fact that people are hearing about it on mainstream television. Everything you've heard is true. It is, dollar for dollar (or, more accurately, pound for pound), the largest scam ever perpetrated through the banking system. Or at least the biggest scam unearthed so far. For those who don't know (and somehow managed to miss the multiple explanations in the commercial press), Libor is the London Inter Bank Offered Rate. It represents the average lending rate between banks for a number of currencies and maturities. The reason the fixing of this rate is so monumentally important is that so many loans and derivatives are priced off of Libor. Some estimates place the value of Libor-linked loans and securities (interest rate swaps, syndicated loans, currencies, variable rate mortgages, forward rate agreements, etc.) at 800 trillion dollars, or about 10 times the GDP of the entire planet. To say that small changes in these rates can have large knock-on effects in the economy at large is an understatement. This isn't to say that the rates were always manipulated upward to maximize profit. They can and were manipulated downward at times, too, to convey a confidence in the stability of the banks that the banksters weren't necessarily feeling on the street."