James Rickards is a hedge fund manager in New York City and the author of “Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis” from Portfolio/Penguin. Follow him on Twitter at @JamesGRickards.
Investors have by now heard of the LIBOR scandal engulfing the banking industry. LIBOR stands for the London Interbank Offered Rate. To some it may be just the latest entry on a list of bank frauds and blunders in recent years, from mortgage scams to MF Global and the London Whale.
In fact, this may be the mother of all scandals—the one that finally leads to criminal charges and the insolvency of major banks. The fraud is breathtakingly easy to understand once past a small amount of jargon. Indeed, the simplicity of the fraud is the greatest threat to the perpetrators because here at last is a fraud that is easy for juries to understand and for prosecutors to prove.
LIBOR is the interest rate at which top-tier banks in London offer to lend to each other on an unsecured basis. The loans are usually short term, typically a day, a week, or several months. Historically the banks in the LIBOR market were among the strongest credits in the world and this type of lending was considered extremely low risk. As a result, LIBOR was among the lowest interest rates available in the market. Other interest rates including corporate loans were benchmarked to LIBOR and expressed as a spread, such as LIBOR plus 1 percent. LIBOR became the base rate used in calculating a vast number of other products and transactions.
LIBOR is set by a committee of banks sending their estimates of the rate at which they could borrow to a trade association. The banks on the committee are among the largest in the world including J.P. Morgan, Citibank, and Bank of America. The trade association would discard the highest and lowest rates and average the rest to arrive at the official LIBOR. This would then be published on financial news services. Payments due under LIBOR transactions would be calculated using that published rate.
We now know that some of the banks on the committee lied about the rates for a period of six years from 2005 to 2010, perhaps longer. The lies had two purposes. The first was to make money for the bank by lowering what it had to pay on LIBOR-based contracts. This is a kind of direct theft from customers. The second reason involved hiding the fact that some banks were being asked to pay high rates during the Panic of 2008. This is considered a sign of distress. By lowering the reported rate, the banks were made to appear healthier than they were and committed a fraud on the market as a whole.
We also know that regulators acted as aiders and abettors of the fraud by ignoring clear signs, including admissions by the banks themselves, that the rates were rigged. Regulators passed vague proposals back and forth about the need to improve practices instead of calling law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute the crimes.
One might expect that the scandal will follow the familiar pattern of bogus bank contrition, slaps on the wrist, large but not life-threatening fines, and pious promises not to do it again soon to be ignored. In short, it's just another scandal.
But this time it's different and here's why: The sheer volume of contracts based on LIBOR defies the imagination. Estimates vary, but $500 trillion seems reasonable. Even if the banks lied by as little as one-tenth of 1 percent, that percentage applied to $500 trillion multiplied by the six years of the fraud comes to $3 trillion stolen from customers. Cutting that amount in half to allow for the fact that some customers benefited from the fraud while others lost still gives implied damages of $1.5 trillion, greater than the combined capital of all of the too-big-too-fail banks in the United States. Taken to the full extent of the law, these damages are enough to render a large segment of the global banking system insolvent. These damages will be pursued not by regulators, but in private lawsuits by class action lawyers.
Bank defendants in cases like this typically ask a judge to dismiss the case because the claims are too vague. However, the facts in this case have already been made plain by Barclays, which is the one large bank to settle its case with the regulators. Once the plaintiffs get past the motion to dismiss, they begin discovery, which gives the class action lawyers access to internal E-mails, tape recordings, depositions, and other books and records of the perpetrator banks. Based on small glimpses of the doings at Barclays, the communications of the other major bank LIBOR trading desks could be shocking.
This kind of private legal process takes years to play out. In the meantime, some arrests and criminal charges by the government seem likely. In the end, legislatures may have to intervene to limit total damages to avoid the destruction of the too-big-too-fail banks. In this sense, the LIBOR litigation may come to resemble the tobacco litigation where the big tobacco companies embraced a government-backed deal with damages of over $200 billion to avoid eventual bankruptcy in the face of state and private lawsuits.
Of course, the insolvency of a major bank in the face of LIBOR rate rigging charges cannot be ruled out. In that case, good riddance. The big banks have perpetrated a crime wave longer than that of Bonnie and Clyde. If it has taken the law this long to catch up with them, it's better late than never.
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