ANOTHER 'CONSPIRACY THEORY' BITES THE DUST: UBS SETTLES OVER GOLD RIGGING, MANY MORE BANKS TO FOLLOW
Tyler Durden
Remember when everyone decried wholesale Libor manipulation as a crazy conspiracy theory (Zero Hedge: January 2009: "This Makes No Sense: LIBOR By Bank") because after all, it was impossible for so many people to keep their mouth shut or whatever the generic justification is for disproving such "conspiracy theories"? Why, none other than ICAP chief Michael Spencer says they all though Libor was "unmanipulable." As it turns out, not only is Libor manipulable(sic), and a vast rate-rigging "conspiracy theory" is quite possible when everyone's interests are aligned, but it also was massively profitable.
Then it was the turn of the even more massive, multi-trillion FX market, when first UBS squealed like a pig and soon ratted out every other bank in the criminal "Cartel" (or was it "Bandits"?) syndicate (see: "Meet The (First) Seven Banks Who Rigged The FX Market"). End result: banks such as JPM, Citi and BofA forced to review their criminal ways and adjusting their third quarter results a month into Q4. Many more legal fees, charges and settlement coming however for those who lost money on the other side of such long-running manipulation, please accept our condolences: you won't see a penny.
And finally, there was the precious metals market: a market which all the Keynesian fanatic paper bugs said was immune from manipulation, be it of the central or commercial bank kind, even with every other market clearly exposed for perpetual rigging either by hedge funds, by prop desks, by HFTs, or central banks themselves.
CONTINUE READING