The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
Is this story of interest to hackers?The claim that "everything is rigged" is supported by a small number of specific examples coupled with a generous helping of polemics. Facts are not placed in useful contexts. The reader, after reading this article, has likely learned very little but only had whatever pre-bias he had confirmed. It takes a lot more than that to support the fantastic superpowered-global-banking-conspiracy thesis of the article.Since, on articles like this, you tend to be downvoted for going against the zeitgeist, I'll provide a specific example.The civil suit over LIBOR fixing, mentioned on page one, was thrown out because antitrust laws only apply to competitive processes. (Source: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/03/30/Judge-drops-antitr...)Taibbi writes: "In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place." This is a baffling recontextualization: suits are thrown out when they are not lawful because we live in a democratic rule of law, and there is no reason to believe the judge wished to punish or blame consumers. The suit was thrown out because the suit was illegal. This isn't an uncommon or partisan thing: the famous Walmart v. Dukes discrimination lawsuit was thrown out 9-0 by the Supreme Court, because it was unlawful. (The reason the case is famous is because of a 5-4 decision on whether it could be refiled, but that's beyond the scope of this comment.)A long history of reading Taibbi comment threads on HN and r/economics has taught me that Taibbi routinely lies in this fashion; this is just one example.