Rigged: The Incredible True Story of the Whistleblowers Jailed after Exposing the Rotten Heart of the Financial System

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To save themselves from collapse, nationalisation and loss of bonuses, banks instruct traders to manipulate Libor down – a criminal practice known as lowballing. It’s that fact which meant I struggled a bit with what to think of the book - the entire scandal always seemed a bit overblown relative to the scale of the financial crisis (wasn’t it pretty obviously the thing that got prosecuted because it felt comprehensible, rather than because it merited it? In the US, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had gone under; in the UK, Northern Rock and RBS had to be rescued by the state. If you’ve ever suspected the banking system of operating in someone else’s interest than yours, you’re right. A new corporate offence of failing to prevent fraud is being introduced by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill.

Some, such as Paul Tucker, then the deputy governor of the Bank of England, were grilled on whether they had asked institutions like Barclays to purposefully misrepresent the rates in a process known as low-balling, to hide the market's loss of trust in them. French bank Credit Agricole dropped its Euribor estimates of the cost of borrowing euros over three months by 0. Nineteen traders have been convicted and nine jailed because of court rulings that outlawed any influence on Libor apart from the interest rates on offer on the money markets at which a bank could borrow and lend cash. A co-ordinated drive by national central banks and governments pressed banks to manipulate the Libor and Euribor benchmark interest rates at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, an exposé to be published next week alleges. Rigged exclusively shows why all the defendants are innocent, and how any real culprits go unpunished.Former shadow chancellor, Labour MP John McDonnell, agreed that an inquiry should take place into what he described as “scandalous miscarriage of justice”. Andy Verity BBC Economics correspondent and author of the book Rigged joined Joe on the show this morning. The fact sheet goes on to provide ‘dishonest practices in financial markets’ as one example of a way employees can commit fraud. Since I wrote my post about the Bank of England's alleged manipulation of Libor before and during the financial crisis, something of a witch hunt seems to have developed. He has led the media in exposing the true story behind the scandal of interest rate rigging, including a Panorama film revealing the Bank of England's role in it and 'The Lowball Tapes', a 2022 podcast for BBC Radio 4 shortlisted for two awards.

Mr Johnson said he believed the offer to lend at a rate still far below the market, mid-crisis, when other lenders were refusing to lend any cash, was done at the urging of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mr Johnson said in October 2008 he was instructed by his bosses to submit artificially low Libor rates, far below the real interest rates on offer in the market - under pressure from the Bank of England and the UK government. The alleged witches were tied up so they could not swim when they were thrown into the pond as it is written.From 2007 onwards, as the financial crisis began to grip, Libor rates increasingly misrepresented the true cost of lending for banks, leading to accusations of purposeful collusion by bankers to misdirect markets. Before 2017, the legal test for dishonesty under Ghosh required juries to consider whether the defendant was acting dishonestly according to the standards of ordinary reasonable people and whether the defendant realised that what they were doing was dishonest by those standards.