It’s not just Wall Street

It’s not just the USA that allows bankers and financiers to break the law and get away with it.   Or regards the largest financial institutions as “too big to fail”.

This goes back to Prime Minister Tony Blair, who thought he could make London the world’s financial hub by freeing banks from all regulation.

As in the USA, the government’s priority is to protect the financial institutions rather than to protect the public.

Banking regulation is even weaker in Europe than in the United States, and one of the goals of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the next international agreement in the pipeline after the Trans Pacific Partnership, is to set limits on financial regulation.

That would make banking and finance un-reformable, either in the USA, the UK or other TTIP signatories.

Update 5/22/2015.  The five banks that pleaded guilty to rigging interest rates and the exchange rate for foreign currencies are Britain’s Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland, the USA’s Citicorp and JP Morgan Chase and Switzerland’s UBS.

How Barclays’ bank CEO earned his big bonus

Bob Diamond resigned as CEO of Barclays’ bank after it was revealed his bank helped rig the London Interbank Offered Rate, a benchmark interest rate which is used in setting credit card rates, variable mortgage interest rates and other variable rates.  False information made the LIBOR rate higher than it otherwise would have been, and this pushed up other interest rates as well.

Click on The Market Has Spoken—And It Is Rigged for background from Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund.

Click on Libor rate-rigging scandal sets off legal fights for restitution for background on how rigging LIBOR rates hurt local governments in the USA.

I got the cartoon off Ripped-Off Britons, the official blog of The Guardian cartoon strip.