Matt Taibbi - The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam yet... [View all]
Early last week, someone posted a Mike Papantonio clip in the multimedia forum, "Predator Banks Go After Commodities".
Link:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017178702
During that discussion, Pap mentioned a recent Matt Taibbi article which details what the megabanks are up to now. Here's a link to the article:
The Vampire Squid Strikes Again
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-vampire-squid-strikes-again-the-mega-banks-most-devious-scam-yet-20140212
This is what Taibbi calls, "...the wholesale merger of high finance with heavy industry." The megabanks are now speculating in commodities.
snip...
"Allowing one company to control the supply of crucial physical commodities, and also trade in the financial products that might be related to those markets, is an open invitation to commit mass manipulation. It's something akin to letting casino owners who take book on NFL games during the week also coach all the teams on Sundays.
...snip
In just the past few years we've seen an explosion of scandals – from the multitrillion-dollar Libor saga (major international banks gaming world interest rates), to the more recent foreign-currency-exchange fiasco (many of the same banks suspected of rigging prices in the $5.3-trillion-a-day currency markets), to lesser scandals involving manipulation of interest-rate swaps, and gold and silver prices.
But those are purely financial schemes. In these new, even scarier kinds of manipulations, banks that own whole chains of physical business interests have been caught rigging prices in those industries.
I encourage everyone to read Taibbi's article. Will this thievery ever stop?