Where is your OUTRAGE!?!

While many of you are outraged over anything that might control guns in the United States—and anger over criminal behaviors like the Boston bombing, armed robberies and physical crimes—hardly anyone is getting mad over the global financial industries who are rigging the game against ALL OF US.

I know most people don’t read the newspaper, watch TV news or read more than a headline or couple of paragraphs in an article. Maybe that’s why there is no outrage. Or perhaps it’s just a bit too complex for Joe SixPack to grasp. My gut tells me that people not paying attention is why the global financial industry is getting away with rigging the financial game while the masses get all pissed off about Obama, gun control, the Boston bombing or other things that distract us from paying attention to the real crimes.

Just over one year ago the Libor scandal broke. Turns out traders were in direct communication with bankers before the rates were set, thus allowing them an advantage in predicting that day’s fixing. According to this article at Wikipedia (my emphasis), “Libor underpins approximately $350 trillion in derivatives. One trader’s messages indicated that for each basis point (0.01%) that Libor was moved, those involved could net “about a couple of million dollars”.”

Matt Taibbi

Now comes this article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and still there is no outrage: “Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix.”

Taibbi points out how huge scandal #2 is as he describes the manipulation of interest-rate swaps (again, my emphasis), “Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.” Now the banks are manipulating THAT market too. (Sigh…)

We all know the ‘players’ in the stock market have enormous advantages. In Las Vegas I don’t mind 1-2 percentage points going to the ‘house’, but when my 401K, home value and business revenue drops like a rock because the big banks, hedge funds and brokerage houses are rigging the game, you bet I’m pissed.

If you do nothing else, read Taibbi’s article and think about it. If you start to feel anger welling up inside of you, go and read a few of Taibbi’s blog posts and other articles here. He’s one of the few consistent voices who call out the financial industry’s hucksterism. Taibbi wonders out loud why, for example, NO banker has had so much as a token fine or any jail time after the biggest fraud perpetrated on the global financial system in history that caused the 2008 crash.