The Biggest Financial Scam In World History

But the Libor scandal is the biggest financial scam in world history.  See this and this.

The former CEO of Barclays said today that banks across the world were fixing interest rates in the run-up to the financial crisis .

Professor of economics and law Bill Black notes:

It is the largest rigging of prices in the history of the world by many orders of magnitude.

Indeed, the scandal effects an $800 trillion dollar market - 10 times the size of the real world economy.

Matt Taibbi explains that this is the "mega scandal of all mega scandals", because Libor is the "sun at the center of the financial universe", and manipulating Libor means that "the whole Earth is built on quicksand."

Local governments, credit card holders, students, small businesses, small investors, homeowners and virtually everyone else in the entire world has been impacted by the manipulation.

Credit card debt - almost a trillion dollar market - is pegged to Libor. So are student loans - a trillion dollar market.

Mortgages are a bigger market: around $10 trillion dollars in the U.S.  The Washington Post notes today:

60 percent of prime adjustable rate mortgages, and nearly 100 percent of subprime ones, were indexed to LIBOR.