For those here who kept asking why bankers were not jailed for manipulating LIBOR and other rates here is the answer: It was not illegal but soon will be.
LONDON—Manipulating financial benchmarks, including a key currencies benchmark, is set to become a criminal offense that could carry a prison sentence of up to seven years, Chancellor George Osborne said on Monday.
Mr. Osborne confirmed that legislation originally introduced to regulate the Libor interest-rate benchmark will be extended to cover several other instruments, including the 4 p.m. London foreign-exchange benchmark rate and some key gold and silver fixes. The ICE Brent index and the Sterling Overnight Index Average, known as Sonia, is also included along with the ISADFix, which is used to price swaps transactions.
http://www.wsj.com/...
The US should follow suit but that is not likely with a GOP controlled Congress. Anyway, the L in LIBOR is for London where the benchmark originates.
Also, Friday the WSJ ran an excellent piece: How a Memo Cost Big Banks $37 Billion about how the DoJ used a 1989 law created during the S&L crisis to go after large fines for the banks and how that law has a special 10 year statute of limitations expiration.
In a move meant to shake money from the banks, the Justice Department decided to go after them with an unusually potent law created to clean up the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. The law has a lower burden of proof than other laws used by the agency to punish alleged fraud, a much longer statute of limitations and potentially astronomical financial penalties.
Mr. Elias’s discovery has delivered a whopping payoff so far: $36.65 billion, representing the cost of the government’s three separate settlements with the banks since late 2013, including the $16.65 billion deal with Bank of America in August that is the largest ever between the U.S. and a single company.
The total is by far the biggest single chunk of an estimated $128 billion in crisis- and mortgage-related settlements, fines and other costs incurred by the six largest U.S. bank holding companies, according to SNL Financial. Ongoing investigations could push the tally higher.
http://www.wsj.com/...
So the DoJ is in fact doing what it can to extract record fines from the banks.