by SERGE HALIMI
There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where the police chief, Captain Renault, arrives to close Rick’s cafe and announces: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” A croupier hands him a bundle of notes: “Your winnings, sir.” Renault pockets the cash and orders: “Everybody out at once!”
In the financial scandal surrounding the fraudulent fixing of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), it is hard to see who is the corrupt policeman since there are so many likely candidates. Every day, 20 or so major financial establishments (Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Bank of America, etc) fix the Libor. It serves as a benchmark rate for transactions totalling $800,000bn (no, that’s not a misprint), especially on the derivatives market. The sums are so enormous that they encourage the non-financial press to concentrate on more human-scale sins: parents on family allowances who let their children dodge school, Greek workers who supplement their low incomes with black market earnings. These are the people who incur the wrath of governments and the European Central Bank.
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