A Secret Recording Reveals That The Bank Of England Pressured Commercial Banks To Manipulate Interest Rates

UK: The central bank (Bank of England) pressured commercial banks during the 2008 financial crisis to alter their settings for LIBOR (the London Interbank Offered Rate), which is the rate at which banks lend their reserves to each other. That has an impact on the cost of mortgages and loans for retail customers.  By manipulating LIBOR, bankers deliberately pushed up the cost of borrowing for ordinary people. –GEG

The LIBOR scandal reemerged yesterday as the BBC’s Panorama uncovered a secret recording implicating the Bank of England in the interest rate manipulation saga.

According to the BBC the central bank pressured commercial banks during the 2008 financial crisis to lower their settings for LIBOR.

In a telephone recording, aired last night in the UK, a senior Barclays manager, Mark Dearlove, can be heard instructing Libor submitter Peter Johnson, to lower his rates.

Mr Johnson: “So I’ll push them below a realistic level of where I think I can get money?”

Mr Dearlove: “The fact of the matter is we’ve got the Bank of England, all sorts of people involved in the whole thing… I am as reluctant as you are… these guys have just turned around and said just do it.”

The Barclays submitter, Peter Johnson, who is featured in the phone call was jailed in 2016 after pleading guilty to accepting requests to manipulate LIBOR.

Previous assurances from the Bank of England that they were not involved in LIBOR fixing have now come under question again.

It has long been rumoured that the LIBOR fixing went higher than the banks and individuals that were originally implicated.

In 2012, a 2008 telephone note came to light which recorded a phone call between Paul Tucker, executive at the Bank of England at the time and Barclays’ boss Bob Diamond.

The note refers to what is apparently LIBOR not needing to be ‘so high’ as instructed.

The telephone note was taken on the same day that the Panorama aired phone call between Johnson and Dearlove, took place.

Despite the published telephone note, Bob Diamond told the Treasury Select Committee in 2012 that he had only recently became aware of the manipulations.

Chickens coming home to roost

Last week there were also new revelations in a newly published book by David Enrich, ‘The Spider Network’ in which Tom Hayes of UBS tells Enrich “This goes much much higher than me and a lot of what I know…”

Tom Hayes’ bosses were happy to accept his LIBOR fixing in exchange for higher commissions until the CFTC investigation came along. They promptly threw him under a bus and he rightly ended up in prison. However there was little implication for seniors at UBS and of course, the Bank of England.

It is amazing how many times junior employees seem to take the rap by themselves – as if there has been no instruction or oversight from their managers. In the banking world, the lone ‘rogue trader’ is a very common little beast indeed.

Hayes has repeatedly claimed that the real culprits are not the executors of the rigging but those higher up the chain who had instructions to do so.

As a result very little was done at the BOE following the fallout to LIBOR. Some staff quietly left their jobs but there were no charges brought against BOE employees.

By manipulating LIBOR, bankers (and seemingly central bankers) pushed up the cost of borrowing for ordinary people. LIBOR was not regulated in either the UK, US or anywhere else. This appears to be an almost line of defence for the Bank of England who only have to provide information on a voluntary basis to the Serious Fraud Office, as part of a new investigation.

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China Says It Will Attack North Korea’s Nuclear Facilities If Kim Jong Un Crosses A Red Line

China threatened its own ally, North Korea, with destroying its nuclear facilities if North Korea’s actions jeopardize northeastern China through “nuclear leakage or pollution”, according to an editorial written in the Global Times, a tabloid owned by the Communist Party. The article was later removed from the Internet. North Korea’s main exports to China are coal and labor so, when China returned four ships loaded with coal, it was seen as “punishment” for its nuclear testing. [Somehow, all this looks more like political theater for public consumption with each passing day.] –GEG

With everyone putting down new and/or revised “red lines”, be it on Syria or North Korea, it was now China’s turn to reveal its “red” or rather “bottom line”, and in a harshly worded editorial titled “The United States Must Not Choose a Wrong Direction to Break the DPRK Nuclear Deadlock on Wednesday” Beijing warned it would attack North Korea’s facilities producing nuclear bombs, effectively engaging in an act of war, if North Korea crosses China’s “bottom line.”

The editorial in the military-focused Global Times tabloid, owned and operated by the Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper, said that North Korea’s nuclear activities must not jeopardize northeastern China, and that if the North impacts China with its illicit nuclear tests through either “nuclear leakage or pollution”, then China will respond with force.

 “China has a bottom line that it will protect at all costs, that is, the security and stability of northeast China… If the bottom line is touched, China will employ all means available including the military means to strike back. By that time, it is not an issue of discussion whether China acquiesces in the US’ blows, but the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will launch attacks to DPRK nuclear facilities on its own.”

This, as the editorial puts it, is the “bottom line” for China; should it be crossed China will employ all means available including the military means to strike back,” warned the editorial.

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Illegal Immigration From Mexico In Steep Decline Because New Migrants Know They Will Be Arrested And Deported

President Trump’s executive order allowing the US Border Patrol to enforce laws has drastically reduced illegal immigration from Mexico, because new immigrants are no longer willing to risk being arrested and deported. –GEG

You definitely will NOT hear the Mainstream Media talking about this! Donald Trump just managed to do in Mexico the one thing liberals said was absolutely impossible.

TRUMP HAS BASICALLY ENDED ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION FROM MEXICO!

Are you wondering exactly WHY they quit coming? Well, according to border patrol agents…

…Illegal Immigrants are no longer willing to take the risk and pay the high fees to come here illegally because they KNOW they will just get arrested and deported!

I mean this is so huge, EVERYONE should be reporting on it. For God’s sake, in Yuma Arizona, illegal border crossings have dropped from 1155 in January to just 336 in March! UNBELIEVABLE!

And what did Trump have to do to accomplish this Herculean feat? It’s simple, all he did was sign an Executive Order saying the Border Patrol were allowed to enforce the laws already on the books.

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Russian President Putin Accuses ‘Enemies Of Assad’ Of Planning False-Flag Chemical Attacks

Russian President Putin declared that the recent chemical attack in Idlib, Syria, was a false-flag event, which is an operation staged by one government to make it look like it was committed by another. He said his intelligence sources report that anti-Assad militants are transporting toxic agents into several parts of Syria with the intent of blaming Assad and, thereby, justify more strikes from the US. The UK Independent reported that Putin accused the US of planning to drop chemical weapons in Damascus as a pretext for future aggression while blaming Russia for the chemical attack last week. –GEG

At a Tuesday press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed last week’s chemical weapons attack in the Idlib province of Syria was a “false flag” – a phony operation staged by enemies of Russia and Syria to discredit them. He said more such false flag operations were on the way.

“We have reports from multiple sources that false flags like this one – and I cannot call it otherwise – are being prepared in other parts of Syria, including the southern suburbs of Damascus. They plan to plant some chemical there and accuse the Syrian government of an attack,” said Putin, as reported by Russia’s RT.com.

“President Mattarella and I discussed it, and I told him that this reminds me strongly of the events in 2003, when the US representatives demonstrated at the UN Security Council session the presumed chemical weapons found in Iraq,” Putin continued, referring to Italian President Sergio Mattarella, who appeared with him at the press conference in Moscow.

“The military campaign was subsequently launched in Iraq and it ended with the devastation of the country, the growth of the terrorist threat and the appearance of Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS] on the world stage,” Putin declared.

According to RT.com, the Russian General Staff has prepared a report that claims “militants” among the Syrian rebellion are “transporting toxic agents into several parts of Syria.”

“These actions are aimed at creating a new pretext for accusing the government of Syria of more chemical weapons attacks and provoking more strikes by the US,” said Colonel-General Sergey Rudskoy, head of operations for the General Staff.

The Associated Press reports that Russia’s General Staff has expressed a willingness to allow international inspectors to examine the Sharyat airbase in Syria for traces of chemical weapons, and offered to provide military security for the inspectors. Putin said he would appeal to the United Nations to investigate the incident.

The UK Independent reports that Putin more specifically accused the United States of planning to drop chemical weapons on Damascus and then blame the incident on Assad, although it does not provide a translation of the Russian president’s precise words to that effect.

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Warm Water And Loss Of Arctic Ice Produce Global-Warming Hysteria In 1922

The Washington Post published an Associated Press article from the Commerce Department of Norway describing a catastrophic warming of the Arctic Ocean that caused the disappearance of glaciers and the loss of seals and fish.  The punchline is that the story was written in 1922 before “man-made” global warming was a guilt-inducing narrative. –GEG

The original source of the story resurfacing recently was from an Inside the Beltway column of August 14th, 2007. The newspaper article was located in the Library of Congress archives by James Lockwood.

Here is the text of the Washington Post (Associated Press) article:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

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Former British Ambassador To Syria Warns That ‘Fake Flag’ Attacks Are Being Used And Will Increase.

Former British Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, says the recent gas attack could have been the work of Assad’s enemies to create a pretext to attack Syria.  He cited the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that did not exist but, nevertheless, were the excuse for launching a war there. He says there will be more attacks, because Trump is told they are real, and they pressure him to react with military action. -GEG