My thanks to Mr. V.T. for sharing this, and you may not have heard of it, and if you haven't heard of it, I don't blame you. It seems we've been subjected to a "latest biggest financial scandal" about every six months. First Greece and "austerity"; then Italy, then Spain. Before that we had the derivatives and credit default swap scandal. The mortgage bubble and fraud, the news that big banks were - surprise surprise! - basically crooks and robo-signing mortgages. There was massive inducement to fraud in the system (think of that in respect to the Obamacare fiasco). Then came the bailouts and the "too big to jail"...er... I mean, "too big to fail" banks and their banksters. Then LIBOR... then the highly suspicious death of Michael Hastings, then the Edward Snowden allegations and the increasing corroboration from other sources that the NSA spying was really about finance. Granted, the socialist policies of various countries has a lot to do with the problem, the USA being the biggest example of rich hypocritical leftists in bed with rich hypocritical mercantilist crapitalists; forget about Spain or Italy. They've merely been following our example.

Then came the calls for gold repatriation. The late Mr. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela - himself no foreigner to expropriation - asked for his gold back. That began a "repatriation" run, as he was quickly followed by Ecuador, and a variety of other countries, most importantly Germany, which, for the second time in a century, discovered that the US New York Federal Reserve had apparently lost its gold (the first time was in 1928, during a visit of Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht).

But wait! There's more!

Chase Isn't the Only Bank in Trouble

Now I hope you caught the really interesting thing in this article, and it isn't about the sudden spikes before and after the WM/Reuters announcements are made in London. The intriguing thing here to me is this:

"Perhaps most importantly, however, there's a major drama brewing over legal case in London tied to the Libor scandal. "Guardian Care Homes, a British "residential home care operator," is suing the British bank Barclays for over $100 million for allegedly selling the company interest rate swaps based on Libor, which numerous companies have now admitted to manipulating, in a series of high-profile settlements. The theory of the case is that if Libor was not a real number, and was being manipulated for years as numerous companies have admitted, then the Libor-based swaps banks sold to companies like Guardian Care are inherently unenforceable. "A ruling against the banks in this case, which goes to trial in April of next year in England, could have serious international ramifications. Suddenly, cities like Philadelphia and Houston, or financial companies like Charles Schwab, or a gazillion other buyers of Libor-based financial products might be able to walk away from their Libor-based contracts. Basically, every customer who's ever been sold a rotten swap product by a major financial company might now be able to get up from the table, extend two middle fingers squarely in the direction of Wall Street, and simply walk away from the deals. "Nobody is mincing words about what that might mean globally. From a Reuters article on the Guardian Care case: "'"To unwind all Libor-linked derivative contracts would be financial Armageddon," said Abhishek Sachdev, managing director of Vedanta Hedging, which advises companies on interest rate hedging products. "Concern over all of this grew even hotter last week with the latest Libor settlement, in which yet another major bank, the Dutch powerhouse Rabobank, got caught monkeying with the London rate."

Now, let's put this into perspective by connecting the LIBOR rate to all those credit-default swaps and derivatives that we heard about in connection to the "too big to jail" bailouts, for the thing to be noted here is that at some level, all derivatives were tied more or less implicitly to the LIBOR rates, since they play such a major role in international transaction, and since many derivatives "products" bundle all sorts of swaps - domestic and international - together. Nor is this just speculation, for it is explicitly mentioned in the article:

"Here at home, virtually simultaneous to the Rabobank settlement, Fannie Mae filed a suit against nine banks – including Barclays Plc (BARC), UBS AG (UBSN), Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse Group AG, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan – for manipulating Libor, claiming that the mortgage-financing behemoth lost over $800 million due to manipulation of the benchmark rate by the banks."

Note also the role of prime international banks like JP Morgan:

"And virtually simultaneous to that, JP Morgan Chase disclosed that it is currently the target of no fewer than eight federal investigations, for activities ranging from possible bribery of foreign officials in Asia to allegations of improper mortgage-bond sales to . . . the Libor mess. "The scope and breadth of risky practices at JPMorgan are mind-boggling," Mark Williams, a former Federal Reserve bank examiner, toldBloomberg."

(Now, as an aside to those who like dot-connecting and who've been following the much bigger story: remember that the sprawling web of JP Morgan Chase also made an appearance in the metal-bands around $100,000 Wilson Gold certificates in the Spanish Bearer Bond scandal. See my Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations, pp. 49-50, making it a possibility that this is one of the institutions perhaps participating in the hidden system of finance that I have hypothesized was put into place before, and immediately after, World War Two... and it makes that little alleged check-cashing episode with Martin Bormann even more interesting).

But the scale of what is involved here is what Rolling Stone gets correct, and it's the sheer scale of the fraud that has been perpetrated that is rocking the trust in western financial institutions and the "too big to jail" banksters to their very foundations:

"One gets the feeling that governments in all the major Western democracies would like to sweep these manipulation scandals under the rug. The only problem is that the scale of the misdeeds in these various markets is so enormous that even the most half-assed attempt at regulation will cause a million-car pileup. "There's simply no way to do a damage calculation that won't wipe out the entire finance sector when you're talking about pervasive, ongoing manipulation of $5-trillion-a-day markets. That's the problem – there's no way to do a slap on the wrist in these cases. If they're guilty, they're done."