Notes on Wall Street’s Bid-Rigging Scandal
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/notes-on-wall-streets-bid-rigging-scandal-20120622
This is Matt’s follow up to his article I briefly discuss here. It is much shorter, for those of you who couldn’t make it through the original, but has additional references for those of you who want to do research.
One big thing that didn’t make it into the article was that the towns and cities are screwed coming as well as going:
“Municipals virtually never, never default,” says Rebecca Kaplan, a city councilwoman in Oakland, one of the cities listed as a victim in the Carollo trial (the defendants rigged an auction for a Port of Oakland bond deal). “And yet munis receive ratings that, if you were comparing them to corporate ratings, you would think you were talking about a significant risk of default.”
He also mentions that there appear to be several investigations into wide-spread rigging of the LIBOR, which should be even more terrifying because that really is a global conspiracy, if true (personally, I don’t doubt the likelihood). That hits _everyone_ because so many other interest rates are set on the LIBOR. But of course, Americans can’t be bothered with learning anything complex and besides, the big financial organizations say they aren’t doing anything wrong anyway so fuhgeddaboudit.
