With Canada Day
celebrations and our attention to home matters, perhaps you missed the latest
in a long line of top-tier financial scandals.
I know you’re probably tired of hearing about some yahoo in a suit who
takes gullible people for their cash.
Unless you are or you know someone who’s been robbed by one it probably
doesn’t register – life goes on as we’ve known it. But while an investment scheme gone bad might
be a one-time event, banking scandals are symptoms of greater problems that do affect
us all, for we all use the banking system.
I can honestly say ‘symptom’, because like a symptom, they seem to get
larger and larger.
On Monday, Barclays agreed
to pay just over 450 million dollars in a fine for manipulation of the Libor
rate. Now check the gut ‘who cares’
reaction, because the Libor rate is linked to the interest rate of 800 TRILLION
dollars in securities. You pay interest
on a mortgage or line of credit or credit card?
That interest rate is linked to the Libor. And – surprise(!) - That rate has been
artificially manipulated to the great benefit of select bankers (through
increased earnings and subsequent bonuses) at YOUR expense. This is not unearthed like some deeply hidden
and distressing fact, it is freely admitted like a ‘fact of doing
business’. Impressed? I thought not.
The thing is, we are
finding out about this AFTER the 2008 Lehman collapse, AFTER the 2004
Clearstream Affair, AFTER 2003/4 subprime mortgage crisis, AFTER WorldCom
(2002) and Enron (2001), AFTER the 1995 Barings Bank collapse, AFTER the 1991
BCCI collapse, etc, etc.
How many trillions of
dollars must be risked before the general population realizes that common sense
for commoners is not perceived as the same common sense for those in places of
financial power? How many scandals will
it take before company shareholders start demanding that greed not be
incentivized over responsibility? How
many times must we watch the highly educated and professional act like little
more than educated and finely dressed thieves before we stop assuming that
worldly training results in any kind of moral compass at all?
Actually, the problem goes
far deeper than that. Ravi Zacharias
points out, “Why is it that we in our Ivy League Schools teach our budding
business men and women that all that is - is relative - that there is no
absolute moral law, that all is relative.
Then when they become heads of Enron and live out a relativistic ethic
we put them behind bars? [Shouldn’t] we
bring the professors to trial too?”[1] A valid question. Maybe we should be asking it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearstream#The_Clearstream_affair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barings_Bank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Credit_and_Commerce_International
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