Barclays Libor emails paint ugly picture

Ever feel like the financial markets are simply a rigged game where the house (i.e. the world's largest banks) always win? Reading text messages and emails between traders at Barclays (BCS) about their often successful attempts to manipulate global benchmarks for interest rates will only reinforce that belief. These traders influenced the pricing of the London Interbank Offered Rate or Libor, a benchmark that dictates the pricing of up to $800 trillion of securities (yes trillion) and several other key benchmarks between 2005 and 2009. Traders' emails and text messages were made public as part of a $453 million settlement Barclays with U.S. and U.K. regulators to settle its role in the Libor manipulation. Libor rates are reset daily by British banking regulators who receive quotes from up to 18 banks on what it costs them to borrow in the public markets each day. Interest rate swaps traders in New York and London asked Barclays employees and employees at other banks to move rates in directions that benefited their trading positions, according to the bank's settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.