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by nubbins 3007 days ago
I read The Spider Network (fantastic look into how bank prop trading worked) and came to mostly the same conclusions. The idea of just prosecuting "rouge traders" is a complete injustice, as trying to adjust the rate submissions was apparently a widely known practice in banks. Tom Hayes, a mildly autistic savant just doing what everyone else was got 14 years, essentially a murder sentence in the UK. Fire the traders and maybe ban them from trading for a few years.

Of course the investing public with LIBOR based loans wants blood, and they just believe the headlines that a few traders "conspired" to fix rates. In reality the entire system was built on a profoundly flawed incentive structure of trusting banks with positions that profit from LIBOR moves to not alter LIBOR submissions to make themselves money. But LIBOR is too big to fail at this point so they chose to scapegoat a few traders instead of admitting the whole system is corrupt.