A former Barclays employee dropped a bombshell on Saturday--he claimed that the highest-ranking officials at the bank, including former CEO Bob Diamond, knew Barclays traders were fixing the London interbank offered rate.
Although this story passed with scarcely a ripple here in the States, its implications are almost stratospheric. For those who don't know, interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, loans, investments, pensions and many other rates are all tied to LIBOR. So if this story is true, top banking executives knew their traders were illegally forcing millions of people around the world to pay more than they normally would pay and didn't do a thing about it. To my mind, there is only one even remotely appropriate sanction if this is in fact true. Any non-American bank or financial institution whose execs knew about this and did nothing must be banned from operating in the United States.
The general public is up in arms about this in the UK, and if this story were being adequately covered here the outrage would likely be similar. The closest parallel I can draw is the 1869 attempt to corner the gold market.
Banks have been kicked out of the United States for egregiously criminal behavior before. How would this not qualify? If senior execs did in fact know about this and do nothing, they need to be in jail and their banks barred from our shores.