Massive global banker scandal revealed – breaking news in the Mainstream Media

Hundreds of bankers across three continents are embroiled in the interest-rate fixing scandal that has left Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond fighting to save his job.

As pressure intensified on Britain’s highest paid banking boss to quit, MPs heard a string of other financial institutions across the world were under investigation.

At least 20 banks are believed to be under suspicion, with growing demands for a criminal investigation.

Barclays Bank Tower at Churchill Place, Docklands: The bank has been fined £290million over attempts to rig money market interest rates. HSBC is one of the twenty other banks also under investigation, it emerged today

Barclays’ shares crashed by 15.5 per cent in a day as the implications sank in, wiping £3.7billion from its value, with other banks also hit.

Barclays has been fined £290million after devastating emails revealed that its traders manipulated the London Interbank Rate (Libor) – the rate at which banks lend money to each other.

Chancellor George Osborne told the Commons the exchanges ‘read like an epitaph to an age of irresponsibility’.

On the blackest day for Britain’s finance industry since the 2008 economic crisis:

• Serious Fraud Office investigators were revealed to be in talks with financial watchdogs over the scandal
• David Cameron and Ed Miliband piled pressure on Mr Diamond to resign
• Barclays and other banks were braced for a damning verdict today in an official report on mis-selling of complex loans to 28,000 small firms
• Mr Osborne promised new criminal sanctions for those guilty of market abuse
• Downing Street faced a growing clamour for a judge-led public inquiry into the ethics of Britain’s banks

‘Epitaph to an age of irresponsibility’: George Osborne today briefed MPs in the Commons about the unfolding bank trading scandal

David Cameron, who is at an EU summit in Brussels, described the situation as an ‘extremely serious scandal’.

Mr Diamond, who was in charge of Barclays Capital at the time traders are now known to have been rigging the market, has offered to forgo his short-term bonus for this year. But he is still entitled to millions of pounds in salary and long-term share incentives.

Asked how much wider the rate-fixing scandal might go, the Chancellor told MPs: ‘HSBC and RBS are two of the banks under investigation, but international banks such as UBS and Citigroup are under investigation too, partly for activities conducted in this country.’

Mr Osborne said the total impact on the economy and on individuals was ‘extremely difficult to work out, because the Libor rate was manipulated up as well as down’.

‘Sometimes the rate was too low for the true market price, and sometimes it was too high,’ he said.

‘The Financial Services Authority has made it clear, however, that that contributed to a risk to the country’s financial stability, and the cost of that is enormous.’

Tracey McDermott, director of enforcement at the FSA, said: ‘The initial indications are that Barclays was not the only firm that was involved in this.’

As well as RBS and HSBC, others under scrutiny include Lloyds, JPMorgan Chase, Germany’s Deutsche Bank and Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi.

A number of employees have already been fired, suspended or put on gardening leave at various banks including state-backed RBS, which has sacked and suspended ‘several’ staff, though the bank declined to comment.

SACKED RBS TRADER ACCUSES BANK CHIEFS OF COLLUDING WITH STAFF TO RIG INTEREST RATES

The alleged behaviour at RBS started when Fred Goodwin was chief executive

Royal Bank of Scotland managers are accused of colluding to rig the financial markets in court papers filed by a former employee.

Tan Chi Min, a former head of delta trading for RBS’s global banking and markets division in Singapore, alleges that managers condoned collusion between its staff to set the Libor rate artificially high or low to maximise profits.

He names five staff members he claims made requests for the Libor rate to be altered and three senior managers who he said knew what was going on. He also says the practice ‘was known to other members of [RBS]’s senior management’.

Mr Tan, who was eventually sacked for gross misconduct, worked for RBS from August 2006 to November 2011 and it is believed the alleged behaviour started when Fred Goodwin, pictured, was chief executive.

He claims that he was made a ‘scapegoat’ for malpractice condoned by managers and is suing for wrongful dismissal.

In the court papers filed in New York as part of a class action, Mr Lin also implicates hedge fund bosses who have given thousands of pounds to the Conservative Party.

It is claimed that hedge fund Brevan Howard asked RBS to fix financial data by making false submissions. The fund donated £10,000 to the Tories and spent £3,542 on flights for George Osborne to attend a conference in 2008.

RBS said it was confident of mounting a successful defence against Mr Tan’s claims.
Last night there were reports the bank is to be fined £150million for similar offences to those committed by Barclays.

Lloyds said it had suspended two traders. ICAP, the leading City broking firm headed by Tory donor Michael Spencer, has also been dragged into the scandal. It has suspended one employee and placed two on ‘administrative leave’.

A senior manager at U.S. giant Citigroup’s Japanese operation left the firm late last year after his division was temporarily banned from trading linked to Libor and its Tokyo equivalent, Tibor, by the authorities.

Giant Swiss bank UBS said it had approached regulators with information over abuses of the rate-setting system.

The Libor rate is crucial, since it is a key benchmark for trillions of pounds’ worth of financial products.

The £290million fine on Barclays from the UK and U.S. authorities, issued on Wednesday, is likely to be only the beginning of a wave of punishments and civil suits for damages against other banks caught up in the global web of deceit.

Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds are two other UK-based banks under scrutiny as part of the probe

Experts said banks might have to set aside billions of pounds in damages to cover their liabilities resulting from the conspiracy.

Former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Lord Oakeshott said that once any criminal probe was underway, a public inquiry – like the one being conducted by Lord Leveson into media ethics – would have to be held.

‘Clearly, the worms that are now crawling out from under the stones at the banking industry are even worse than any of us thought,’ he added.

THE WORDS THAT WILL COME BACK TO HAUNT BANK CHIEF

Speech: Bob Diamond alongside George Osborne at the Davos World Economic Forum

On 3 November 2011, Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, delivered the BBC Today programme’s inaugural business lecture. Today, his words have come back to haunt him.

‘Rebuilding trust requires banks  to be better citizens. I believe  in this passionately.’

Within a few months of making this statement, Barclays was found guilty of a tax avoidance plot to rob taxpayers of around £500million.

Earlier in 2011, it had been found guilty of enticing elderly customers to gamble their life savings on the stock market. Around 12,000 customers lost half their savings. And this week it was found guilty of a ‘serious and widespread’ attempt to manipulate the Libor interest rates and ordered to pay a fine of £290million.

‘I know how angry customers are about issues such as payment protection insurance. That’s why we are working hard to clear claims as quickly as possible. We want to put things right.’

When a person takes out a credit card or personal loan, they buy the insurance to pay out if they lose their job, or have to stop working due to poor health. But banks, including Barclays, were selling the policies to people who did not need them. Barclays said the PPI scandal would cost them £1billion. Four months after making this speech, he admitted the bill had increased to £1.3billion.

‘But for me the evidence of culture is how people behave when no one is watching them. Our culture must be one where the interests of customers and clients are at the very heart of every decision we make, where we all act with trust and integrity.’

The Financial Services Authority this week found Barclays guilty of misconduct ‘extended over number of years’. The US Department of Justice said simply that the bank was guilty of ‘illegal conduct’ on its attempts to manipulate the Libor rate. The culture of Barclays allowed traders to manipulate Libor in a bid to make sure they scooped millions in bonuses, and to pretend the bank was in a healthier state than it was.

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The Coming Revolution in Wireless

The proliferation of mobile broadband – including smartphones, tablets, and other data-centric devices – and applications and services from Facebook to GPS navigation has transformed the wireless world on many fronts and sent ripples throughout the industry. We used to just talk on our mobile phones. Now we text, email, watch videos, stream music, download games, and browse the Web. Based on this trend, industry observers forecast continued exponential growth in data traffic over the coming years.

According to Cisco, global mobile data traffic grew 2.3-fold in 2011, more than doubling for the fourth year in a row. The mobile-data traffic growth rate was higher than anticipated in 2011 and reached a level equivalent to eight times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. Although mobile-network connection speeds increased 66% to an average of 315 kilobits per second (kbps) in 2011, such gains can't come close to keeping up with demand.

As data usage becomes more intensive, the gap between what systems can deliver and what people need is growing. Cisco forecasts that global mobile-data traffic will increase 18-fold over the next five years, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 78%, reaching 10.8 exabytes per month by 2016. (One exabyte is one quintillion bytes: 1.0 x 10¹⁸, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.) In terms of what the expected demand on wireless systems will be versus the projected capacity of those systems, data from Cisco indicate that in the next two years there will be a 20-fold bandwidth gap between what you're going to want to do on your phone and what the network will be able to deliver.

Many of today's networks and products are already becoming overloaded by the explosive demand for data. And this is just the beginning.

Typically, when wireless carriers like AT&T or Verizon want to upgrade their networks to allow for more data flow and higher speeds, they have to purchase more spectrum at auction from the FCC. A recent example of this was the 700MHz auction in 2008. Both AT&T and Verizon bought large swaths of the 700MHz range to help build out their LTE 4G data networks.

The big carriers live and die by their spectrum, and they're spending billions to secure as much as possible. The problem is that we're now facing a spectrum crunch thanks to the growth of those bandwidth-gobbling smartphones and increasing demand for data across wireless networks. And it's not like we can just conjure up more spectrum.

But what if we didn't have to? What if we could boost the capacity of wireless networks by 100- or 1,000-fold without using any more spectrum? Turns out it might be theoretically possible.

The answer could lie in exploiting a relatively obscure property of light. Particles of light, known as photons, carry two kinds of angular momentum – what's known as "spin angular momentum" (SAM) and "orbital angular momentum" (OAM). SAM is associated with photon spin and is manifested as circular polarization, while OAM is linked to the spatial distribution of photons. To borrow a popular analogy, you can think about SAM and OAM like the Earth-sun system. SAM is akin to the Earth spinning on its axis, while OAM can be represented by the Earth's orbital movement around the sun.

The existence of OAM has been known for a long time, but in standard wireless communications like WiFi, we only modulate the SAM of radio waves. It was not until 2004 – when Miles Padgett and coworkers at the University of Glasgow demonstrated that classical information could be encoded in the OAM states of photons – that the wider scientific community began to ponder the use of OAM for communications networks. What's important about this is that while SAM has only two possible values, OAM can theoretically achieve an infinite number of possible states. These different states provide additional degrees of freedom within which to encode information without the need for a new frequency. Thus, since you could send any number of signals over the same frequency, OAM has the potential to tremendously increase the capacity of communications systems. This future may not be as far off as you might think.

Earlier this year, Bo Thidé of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and while at the University of Padova in Italy, together with some Italian colleagues, confirmed the theory. They demonstrated in a real-world setting that it is possible to use two beams of incoherent radio waves, encoded in two different states of OAM, to simultaneously transmit two independent radio stations on the same frequency. The research opened the door, Thidé says, to the transmission of "an infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth." The spectrum crunch could be close to being solved.

Additional supporting evidence came just last week, when Alan Willner, an electrical engineer from the University of Southern California, and his team published a paper in Nature Photonics titled Terabit free-space data transmission employing orbital angular momentum multiplexing. Quite a title. But the gist is that through the exploitation of different OAM states, the group was able to transmit eight independent channels of data on the same signal across free space at a whopping 2.56 terabits per second (or 320 gigabytes per second). While this is below the world-record data-transmission speed of 26 terabits per second achieved last year by scientists at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, it's the fastest wireless network so far using OAM.

We're not there yet. While the experimental results from Willner and his team are impressive, it's important to note that the transmission distance in this case was only about a meter, and the experiment took place in a vacuum. When asked about the prospects for transmission over long distances in free space, Willner replied:

This is the main goal. One of the challenges in this respect is turbulence in the atmosphere. For situations that require high capacity or spectral efficiency over relatively short distances of less than 1 km, this approach could be appealing. Of course, there are also opportunities for long-distance satellite-to-satellite communications in space, where turbulence is not an issue.

For now, however, spectrum remains a scarce and expensive resource. But we can imagine a future in which OAM technology pans out and is able to boost the capacity of wireless networks as the theory says it should. The result would be similar to how time division multiplexing (TDM) and code division multiple access (CDMA) technologies brought the price of cellphone access plummeting by allowing more information to transmit faster over existing channels. The large swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum that wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon have paid billions for would no longer be necessary to ramp up speed and capacity; prices for unlimited data plans would plummet; and the business model for the whole industry would be rewritten overnight.

Chris Wood is the senior analyst for Casey Extraordinary Technology, which covers robotics, biotechnology, software development and every other aspect of the technology sector. He's also the manager of our analyst team, as well as a regular contributor to The Casey Report, our flagship publication, and the Casey Daily Dispatch.

If you enjoyed Chris' article today, you might also find a piece he wrote about advances in cyber warefare to be equally interesting.

Source: Casey Research