Matt Taibbi on the Biggest Wall Street Scandal of 2012

alternet.org / By Laura Gottesdiener / December 27, 2012

Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi has skewered his fair share of financial faux pas and corporate bigwigs throughout 2012. Yet his prize for the Biggest Wall Street Story of the Year goes to the massive—but little understood—Libor scandal.

“If it’s true that the 16 biggest banks in the world were fixing global interest rates, then it’s hard not to argue that that’s not the biggest financial corruption case in history,” Taibbi says in a web exclusive for Current TV. “I fully expect that we’ll find out in the end that American banks were involved in this scandal.” (Watch video below)

At the heart of the Libor scandal is the simple, primary function of banks: facilitating the borrowing and lending of money. They do this job and still turn a profit using a nifty little trick called interest rates, which essentially means if I borrow money from a bank, I pay back a little extra for their service. Simple? Sort of, except once again the banks have fixed this simple game so that–as in a casino–the house always wins.

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