Two blokes who tried to fiddle Euribor have been sentenced to substantial jail terms.
Good.
The more impersonal markets are – and there’s little quite as impersonal as a futures and swaps market – the more trust in the basics of the system is important. People who breach that shouldn’t be punished because they’re bad ‘uns. Or not solely at least. Nor because they make a bit of money on the side. Especially as those who lose out will be other traders in the same market most of whom are trying to do the same thing. Nope, it’s undermining the trust in the system as a whole.
However, this still doesn’t excuse this tripe:
Two former City traders have been given jail terms after being convicted of attempting to manipulate the European Union’s equivalent of Libor in an effort to boost their profits.
It’s nothing to do with the European Union. Quite literally nothing at all.
It might have something to do with the eurozone which is a rather different thing. But even then it’s not to do with the Eurozone.
The various -bors around the world are private sector measurements of the rates at which banks can borrow from each other. They’re observations – imperfect and all that – of market prices. Sure, these are then used to underpin pricing of all sorts of other deals. But they’re not official. The original wasn’t even planned, it just turned out to be useful.
Euribor is, to a reasonable level of accuracy, a measure of the rates at which banks will lend to each other in euros. Nowt to do with the EU at all.
The impersonal markets thing is why, as a free market supporter, I am in favour of, eg, regulating Hackneys more than Private Hire – it’s an impersonal market where there is no pre-contract contact and post-contract history of the individual purchase to base future purchases on, only the anonymous market itself.
Yes, only Uber et al. have solved the impersonality problem: I might not know you, but I have a wiki written by a hundred of your passengers. And before that, it was solved by branding (and Uber is a brand): Flag down a driver with a brand known to take effective action to protect its riders from bad drivers.
The reason why LIBOR was invented is that all government-controlled data was untrustworthy because it was manipulated.
The guys should be put in the stocks.
As Euribor is a copy of a NON-government creation, it is difficult to see why they *can* (as distinct from “should”) be jailed, but attempting to obtain money by false pretences should get all their unjust gains confiscated plus a good time in the stocks