Barclays caught fiddling!(All the banks now!)

[gordondaviesmoustache]

Re: Barclays caught fiddling!

This was written about Ruper Murdoch but I think it applies here.

Last July I argued that Rupert Murdoch was guilty of willful blindness in his failure to see how pervasive phone hacking had become in his organisation, in his refusal to investigate it and his refusal to acknowledge what other people found. Now, it appears, the Culture Committee agrees with me.

My book, Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril shows that willful blindness has been with us for a long time. It emerged in Victorian times as a legal concept that argues that when there is information we could have, and should have, but somehow manage not to have, we are nonetheless responsible. While most often used to prosecute cases of money laundering and drug trafficking, it was used most sensationally in the government's case against Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and Chairman Ken Lay. This is perhaps the media's Enron moment.

The key driver of Murdoch's blindness has been power. Power encases its recipients in a bubble.

Some of that bubble has a physical reality: encased in limousines, private jets and hotel suites, very powerful individuals rarely inhabit the same world as the rest of us. Moreover, academic studies have shown that those with power are more optimistic, more abstract in their thinking and more confident that they're right. So mentally they're in a bubble too.

But perhaps most potently in Murdoch's case, powerful people can't escape a structural trap: those who hold power are surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear and hide from them what they imagine they don't want to hear. On one level, this is not personal; it afflicts everyone. Ambitious executives want to please their bosses - so they deliver the good news and bury the bad. It's assumed that conflict is undesirable so anything that might provoke it mysteriously disappears. Leaders themselves need do nothing to encourage this: the ambitious of those around them is enough to ensure that they are surrounded by smiling bearers of success stories.

Murdoch isn't the first and he won't be the last to be caught in this power trap. John Browne, when he led BP, was famously ensnared in it, blind to the dangerous operations which led to accidents and fatalities. His later, rather bromidic memoir, acknowledged as much: "I wish someone had challenged me and been brave enough to say: "We need to ask more disagreeable questions."

The truth is that it takes individuals of terrific integrity and fortitude to resist the willful blindness that comes with power. Tony Blair didn't. John Browne didn't. And now the Culture Committee concurs: Rupert Murdoch didn't either.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/margaret-heffernan-/murdochs-willful-blindnes_b_1466877.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/margare ... 66877.html</a>

It's a very dangerous road we go down if we start diluting the concept of mens rea from criminal proceedings. Whilst there are currently examples of this that are mentioned in that article, any further expansion of this principle is very dangerous imo.

To prosecute someone for what they should have known could be used in the case of receiving stolen goods and other cases of dishonesty where a lower threshold of guilt would come to the fore. An innocent mistake on an expenses form could then constitute theft for example. Tempting though it is to develop the law to bring people we don't approve of to task, this should never be considered if the price is a reduction in the liberties that we all sometimes take for granted.

 

[nijinsky's fetlocks]

Re: Barclays caught fiddling!

This was written about Ruper Murdoch but I think it applies here.

Last July I argued that Rupert Murdoch was guilty of willful blindness in his failure to see how pervasive phone hacking had become in his organisation, in his refusal to investigate it and his refusal to acknowledge what other people found. Now, it appears, the Culture Committee agrees with me.

My book, Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril shows that willful blindness has been with us for a long time. It emerged in Victorian times as a legal concept that argues that when there is information we could have, and should have, but somehow manage not to have, we are nonetheless responsible. While most often used to prosecute cases of money laundering and drug trafficking, it was used most sensationally in the government's case against Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and Chairman Ken Lay. This is perhaps the media's Enron moment.

The key driver of Murdoch's blindness has been power. Power encases its recipients in a bubble.

Some of that bubble has a physical reality: encased in limousines, private jets and hotel suites, very powerful individuals rarely inhabit the same world as the rest of us. Moreover, academic studies have shown that those with power are more optimistic, more abstract in their thinking and more confident that they're right. So mentally they're in a bubble too.

But perhaps most potently in Murdoch's case, powerful people can't escape a structural trap: those who hold power are surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear and hide from them what they imagine they don't want to hear. On one level, this is not personal; it afflicts everyone. Ambitious executives want to please their bosses - so they deliver the good news and bury the bad. It's assumed that conflict is undesirable so anything that might provoke it mysteriously disappears. Leaders themselves need do nothing to encourage this: the ambitious of those around them is enough to ensure that they are surrounded by smiling bearers of success stories.

Murdoch isn't the first and he won't be the last to be caught in this power trap. John Browne, when he led BP, was famously ensnared in it, blind to the dangerous operations which led to accidents and fatalities. His later, rather bromidic memoir, acknowledged as much: "I wish someone had challenged me and been brave enough to say: "We need to ask more disagreeable questions."

The truth is that it takes individuals of terrific integrity and fortitude to resist the willful blindness that comes with power. Tony Blair didn't. John Browne didn't. And now the Culture Committee concurs: Rupert Murdoch didn't either.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/margaret-heffernan-/murdochs-willful-blindnes_b_1466877.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/margare ... 66877.html</a>

It's a very dangerous road we go down if we start diluting the concept of mens rea from criminal proceedings. Whilst there are currently examples of this that are mentioned in that article, any further expansion of this principle is very dangerous imo.

To prosecute someone for what they should have known could be used in the case of receiving stolen goods and other cases of dishonesty where a lower threshold of guilt would come to the fore. An innocent mistake on an expenses form could then constitute theft for example. Tempting though it is to develop the law to bring people we don't approve of to task, this should never be considered if the price is a reduction in the liberties that we all sometimes take for granted.

I did O-level Latin,so I get the concept of 'guilty mind'.
I hope those who didn't don't take your preoccupation with 'mens rea' the wrong way.

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

Re: Barclays caught fiddling!

This was written about Ruper Murdoch but I think it applies here.

Last July I argued that Rupert Murdoch was guilty of willful blindness in his failure to see how pervasive phone hacking had become in his organisation, in his refusal to investigate it and his refusal to acknowledge what other people found. Now, it appears, the Culture Committee agrees with me.

My book, Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril shows that willful blindness has been with us for a long time. It emerged in Victorian times as a legal concept that argues that when there is information we could have, and should have, but somehow manage not to have, we are nonetheless responsible. While most often used to prosecute cases of money laundering and drug trafficking, it was used most sensationally in the government's case against Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and Chairman Ken Lay. This is perhaps the media's Enron moment.

The key driver of Murdoch's blindness has been power. Power encases its recipients in a bubble.

Some of that bubble has a physical reality: encased in limousines, private jets and hotel suites, very powerful individuals rarely inhabit the same world as the rest of us. Moreover, academic studies have shown that those with power are more optimistic, more abstract in their thinking and more confident that they're right. So mentally they're in a bubble too.

But perhaps most potently in Murdoch's case, powerful people can't escape a structural trap: those who hold power are surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear and hide from them what they imagine they don't want to hear. On one level, this is not personal; it afflicts everyone. Ambitious executives want to please their bosses - so they deliver the good news and bury the bad. It's assumed that conflict is undesirable so anything that might provoke it mysteriously disappears. Leaders themselves need do nothing to encourage this: the ambitious of those around them is enough to ensure that they are surrounded by smiling bearers of success stories.

Murdoch isn't the first and he won't be the last to be caught in this power trap. John Browne, when he led BP, was famously ensnared in it, blind to the dangerous operations which led to accidents and fatalities. His later, rather bromidic memoir, acknowledged as much: "I wish someone had challenged me and been brave enough to say: "We need to ask more disagreeable questions."

The truth is that it takes individuals of terrific integrity and fortitude to resist the willful blindness that comes with power. Tony Blair didn't. John Browne didn't. And now the Culture Committee concurs: Rupert Murdoch didn't either.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/margaret-heffernan-/murdochs-willful-blindnes_b_1466877.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/margare ... 66877.html</a>

It's a very dangerous road we go down if we start diluting the concept of mens rea from criminal proceedings. Whilst there are currently examples of this that are mentioned in that article, any further expansion of this principle is very dangerous imo.

To prosecute someone for what they should have known could be used in the case of receiving stolen goods and other cases of dishonesty where a lower threshold of guilt would come to the fore. An innocent mistake on an expenses form could then constitute theft for example. Tempting though it is to develop the law to bring people we don't approve of to task, this should never be considered if the price is a reduction in the liberties that we all sometimes take for granted.

I did O-level Latin,so I get the concept of 'guilty mind'.
I hope those who didn't don't take your preoccupation with 'mens rea' the wrong way.

 

[twinkletoes]

Re: Barclays caught fiddling!

This was written about Ruper Murdoch but I think it applies here.

Last July I argued that Rupert Murdoch was guilty of willful blindness in his failure to see how pervasive phone hacking had become in his organisation, in his refusal to investigate it and his refusal to acknowledge what other people found. Now, it appears, the Culture Committee agrees with me.

My book, Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril shows that willful blindness has been with us for a long time. It emerged in Victorian times as a legal concept that argues that when there is information we could have, and should have, but somehow manage not to have, we are nonetheless responsible. While most often used to prosecute cases of money laundering and drug trafficking, it was used most sensationally in the government's case against Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and Chairman Ken Lay. This is perhaps the media's Enron moment.

The key driver of Murdoch's blindness has been power. Power encases its recipients in a bubble.

Some of that bubble has a physical reality: encased in limousines, private jets and hotel suites, very powerful individuals rarely inhabit the same world as the rest of us. Moreover, academic studies have shown that those with power are more optimistic, more abstract in their thinking and more confident that they're right. So mentally they're in a bubble too.

But perhaps most potently in Murdoch's case, powerful people can't escape a structural trap: those who hold power are surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear and hide from them what they imagine they don't want to hear. On one level, this is not personal; it afflicts everyone. Ambitious executives want to please their bosses - so they deliver the good news and bury the bad. It's assumed that conflict is undesirable so anything that might provoke it mysteriously disappears. Leaders themselves need do nothing to encourage this: the ambitious of those around them is enough to ensure that they are surrounded by smiling bearers of success stories.

Murdoch isn't the first and he won't be the last to be caught in this power trap. John Browne, when he led BP, was famously ensnared in it, blind to the dangerous operations which led to accidents and fatalities. His later, rather bromidic memoir, acknowledged as much: "I wish someone had challenged me and been brave enough to say: "We need to ask more disagreeable questions."

The truth is that it takes individuals of terrific integrity and fortitude to resist the willful blindness that comes with power. Tony Blair didn't. John Browne didn't. And now the Culture Committee concurs: Rupert Murdoch didn't either.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/margaret-heffernan-/murdochs-willful-blindnes_b_1466877.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/margare ... 66877.html</a>

It's a very dangerous road we go down if we start diluting the concept of mens rea from criminal proceedings. Whilst there are currently examples of this that are mentioned in that article, any further expansion of this principle is very dangerous imo.

To prosecute someone for what they should have known could be used in the case of receiving stolen goods and other cases of dishonesty where a lower threshold of guilt would come to the fore. An innocent mistake on an expenses form could then constitute theft for example. Tempting though it is to develop the law to bring people we don't approve of to task, this should never be considered if the price is a reduction in the liberties that we all sometimes take for granted.

Any law could be bound up in FSA regulations.

If we had such a law would we have CEO's of banks resigning now?

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

Re: Barclays caught fiddling!

This was written about Ruper Murdoch but I think it applies here.

Last July I argued that Rupert Murdoch was guilty of willful blindness in his failure to see how pervasive phone hacking had become in his organisation, in his refusal to investigate it and his refusal to acknowledge what other people found. Now, it appears, the Culture Committee agrees with me.

My book, Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril shows that willful blindness has been with us for a long time. It emerged in Victorian times as a legal concept that argues that when there is information we could have, and should have, but somehow manage not to have, we are nonetheless responsible. While most often used to prosecute cases of money laundering and drug trafficking, it was used most sensationally in the government's case against Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and Chairman Ken Lay. This is perhaps the media's Enron moment.

The key driver of Murdoch's blindness has been power. Power encases its recipients in a bubble.

Some of that bubble has a physical reality: encased in limousines, private jets and hotel suites, very powerful individuals rarely inhabit the same world as the rest of us. Moreover, academic studies have shown that those with power are more optimistic, more abstract in their thinking and more confident that they're right. So mentally they're in a bubble too.

But perhaps most potently in Murdoch's case, powerful people can't escape a structural trap: those who hold power are surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear and hide from them what they imagine they don't want to hear. On one level, this is not personal; it afflicts everyone. Ambitious executives want to please their bosses - so they deliver the good news and bury the bad. It's assumed that conflict is undesirable so anything that might provoke it mysteriously disappears. Leaders themselves need do nothing to encourage this: the ambitious of those around them is enough to ensure that they are surrounded by smiling bearers of success stories.

Murdoch isn't the first and he won't be the last to be caught in this power trap. John Browne, when he led BP, was famously ensnared in it, blind to the dangerous operations which led to accidents and fatalities. His later, rather bromidic memoir, acknowledged as much: "I wish someone had challenged me and been brave enough to say: "We need to ask more disagreeable questions."

The truth is that it takes individuals of terrific integrity and fortitude to resist the willful blindness that comes with power. Tony Blair didn't. John Browne didn't. And now the Culture Committee concurs: Rupert Murdoch didn't either.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/margaret-heffernan-/murdochs-willful-blindnes_b_1466877.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/margare ... 66877.html</a>

It's a very dangerous road we go down if we start diluting the concept of mens rea from criminal proceedings. Whilst there are currently examples of this that are mentioned in that article, any further expansion of this principle is very dangerous imo.

To prosecute someone for what they should have known could be used in the case of receiving stolen goods and other cases of dishonesty where a lower threshold of guilt would come to the fore. An innocent mistake on an expenses form could then constitute theft for example. Tempting though it is to develop the law to bring people we don't approve of to task, this should never be considered if the price is a reduction in the liberties that we all sometimes take for granted.

Any law could be bound up in FSA regulations.

If we had such a law would we have CEO's of banks resigning now?

Ok that's a perfectly reasonable suggestion. It's certainly worthy of consideration and would need to be ECHR compliant. As long as it only act as a deterrent to wrongdoing and not the sector as a whole then it's definitely worth looking at, but I'd need to be certain that it was ring fenced to those FSA regs in perpetuity before I was happy with it.

 

[T_Bone]

Re: Barclays caught fiddling!

I've got a credit card with these fuckers. I paid £350 off one month and the twats decided to reduce my card limit to a figure that meant I was overdrawn on it. And I've been over the agreed limit now for months. Can I sue the bastards?

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

Re: Barclays caught fiddling!

I've got a credit card with these fuckers. I paid £350 off one month and the twats decided to reduce my card limit to a figure that meant I was overdrawn on it. And I've been over the agreed limit now for months. Can I sue the bastards?

I strongly suspect that what they have done will be in the terms and conditions of the contract between you and them and will therefore be "acceptable".

 

[T_Bone]

Re: Barclays caught fiddling!

I've got a credit card with these fuckers. I paid £350 off one month and the twats decided to reduce my card limit to a figure that meant I was overdrawn on it. And I've been over the agreed limit now for months. Can I sue the bastards?

I strongly suspect that what they have done will be in the terms and conditions of the contract between you and them and will therefore be "acceptable".

I'm taking this to the very top then!! I'm a customer, I'm always right!

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

Re: Barclays caught fiddling!

I've got a credit card with these fuckers. I paid £350 off one month and the twats decided to reduce my card limit to a figure that meant I was overdrawn on it. And I've been over the agreed limit now for months. Can I sue the bastards?

I strongly suspect that what they have done will be in the terms and conditions of the contract between you and them and will therefore be "acceptable".

I'm taking this to the very top then!! I'm a customer, I'm always right!

You'd think so, looking at the adverts!!

 

[Swales lives]

Re: Barclays caught fiddling!

It was Barclays that reported the incident to the FSA, it was the FSA who made the record fine - how do you reconcile that with your vision of this murky world of back street deals and winks and nudges?

Barclays reporting the practice does not exonerate them. I want all the banks and individuals involved in this grand-fraud fined to the hilt and some serious jail-terms handed out. Not just for the Barclays lot - but all of the banks involved.

Does the general public not realise how much they have been swindled in the past 7 years or more?

We've payed too much for loans, mortgages and credit cards 'cos the 'free-market' was 'fixed'. Small businesses have been mis-sold useless and expensive financial products, some people have gone bankrupt, had their houses repossessed. Even worse, some people have taken their own lives, killed their loved ones 'cos they can't cope with modern life and the financial pressures it brings. The banks with their fraudulent practices have aided and abetted many tragedies. You may think I'm exaggerating but these bankers have blood on their hands. And I want the bastards to pay.

If you read what I said you'd have seen that I did not suggest they should be exonerated (indeed in previous posts I have suggest the exact opposite) I was merely countering the suggestion there is going to be some sort of "cover-up".

As for the bit underlined I really don't know where to begin - most (~98%) of retail mortgages in the UK use the BoE Base Rate rather than LIBOR, some commerical loans and "specalist" mortgages would peg to LIBOR and the amounts involved are not known yet and we need to remember the difference in the LIBOR rate smoothed over time (the manipulation was down as well as up) will be probably close to 0 although it is highly likely that some people will have been negatively impacted (and some positively) both directly and indirectly and they need compensation. The chances that the level of rate manipulation directly led to any tragedies I think would be remote as the rate variations involved are pretty small and if you can't afford say a 0.25% move in a loan interest rate then you've got much bigger financial problems and, subject to circumstances having changed, should look into being mis-sold your loan.

I haven't read your earlier posts on the thread MB, so I'm not accusing you of sticking up for the banks or anything, I've no beef with you. I've just popped on to vent my spleen. You obviously have some insight into the goings-on of interest rates, I don't.

I'm coming from the angle of an 'ordinary Joe' whose only dealings with large financial institutions is paying my wages in and spending it on mortgages, credit cards cards etc. I don't know how the rates are set. I appreciate that The Stock Exchange is a big casino and that billions are won and lost everyday and it's a different world to the one I inhabit.

My anger comes from the fact that the big banks 'fixed the game', the people involved were meant to be from rival companies, not hand-in-glove with each other. The game was bent. As Pauldominic pointed out "LIBOR was at the heart of the crisis in 2008". This brought on the recession, with all the sub-prime debt impacted massively across the globe. Millions of people lost their jobs and were unable to keep up payments on their homes. It's not about 0.25% interest rate moves. It's about a much wider impact where families had their bread-winners slung on the scrapheap and the repercussions of that pressure. I stand by my "bankers have blood on their hands" statement. The fall-out of the past 5 years is enormous and many have lost their lives - this cannot be proved, but some people are so fragile and have money as their sole reason for being. When it's taken away they are lost and on the edge. The marriage might break down, the family home lost... what next? suicide? kill the ex? kill the kids?
It's all happened.