This should be interesting...

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
(This story will appear in the May 9th edition of Rolling Stone Magazine)

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the
Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an
apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your
basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out
in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled
out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be
fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and
perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have
been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around
with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t")
worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into
public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in
history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of
magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has
leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker
of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities
for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess.
Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at
ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to
manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to
calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations
and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their
use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market,
meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100
times the size of the United States federal budget…
....

....Translation: When prices are set by companies that can profit by
manipulating them, we're ****ed...
....

Ahh, banksters.