UK bankers may go to jail for rigging interest rates

Some will rob with a 6-gun, some with a fountain pen.

When the former head of the World Bank says some bankers should be in jail for lowering your standard of living causing the financial meltdown, well, maybe SOMEONE OUGHT TO PUT THEM IN JAIL.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winner,  a former Clinton White House official and supporter of Occupy Wall Street.

Stiglitz harshly criticizes "rent-seeking," which means taking resources from someone else rather than creating wealth. Like those hidden fees on your checking account.

Here's what Stiglitz recently told The Independent:

He argues that breaking the economic and political power that has been amassed by the financial sector in recent decades, especially in the US and the UK, is essential if we are to build a more just and prosperous society. The first step, he says, is sending some bankers to jail. " That ought to change. That means legislation. Banks and others have engaged in rent seeking, creating inequality, ripping off other people, and none of them have gone to jail." 

Next, politicians need to stop spending so much time listening to the financial lobby, which, according to Stiglitz, demonstrates its spectacular economic ignorance whenever it claims that curbs on banks' activities will damage the broader economy.

The good news is that the UK is likely to prosecute the bankers who manipulated the LIBOR rate, which is likely to have cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars. Reports FT Adviser,

The Serious Fraud Office announced today (30 July) that criminal charges could be brought in regards to the conduct exhibited by those who manipulated the London interbank offered rate. 

David Green QC, director of the SFO, said that he is “satisfied that existing criminal offences are capable of covering conduct in relation to the alleged manipulation of Libor and related interest rates”. 

The investigation, announced on 6 July, involves a number of financial institutions including Barclays who has already been fined £290m by global regulators and whose chief executive Bob Diamond has stepped down, as well as HSBC, which confirmed today that it was being investigated.

Go get 'em.