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How to Get Away with Financial Fraud
Article

How to Get Away with Financial Fraud

The Guardian, 2018

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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Hot Topic
  • Engaging

Recommendation

In the summer of 2012, global financial headlines centered on the British bank Barclays’s masterful manipulation of Libor interest rates. Yet despite the novelty of the machinations involved, the root of the scheme hewed a path similar to those of many previous monetary crimes. Investment insider and author Dan Davies dissects the psychology and pathology of major institutions’ devious behavior that investors and regulators often overlook because, as Davies explains, the activities are “outside your field of vision.” getAbstract recommends this engaging narrative of financial scams and scandals to investors and executives.

Summary

Global banking giant Barclays faced intense scrutiny in 2012 from the British government and US regulators about its tampering with the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor). Before the British Parliament, embattled Barclays CEO Bob Diamond answered questions, confident that the hefty fines the bank had agreed to pay would buffer it from further damage. How wrong he was. The political class, still reeling from the excesses of the financial industry’s malfeasance leading up to the 2008 global crisis, pounced on the Libor criminality with a vengeance. The...

About the Author

Dan Davies is an author and a former economist at the Bank of England.