Posts Tagged ‘Libor’

The Wussification of America: How We Let Wall Street Become The New Schoolyard Bully

Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

Wall Street, The New Bully of the BlockAs I worked out in the gym today and watched the Olympics, I realized that Americans as a whole no longer participate in the sports that we used to as kids. It used to be the case that regular kids would go to the local Y and do activities like archery and dodge ball.

Today, most high school students don’t even get any physical activity, let alone participate in organized activities that can be perceived as violent or risky. Schools and the Y’s no longer want to risk having the liability for kids to develop a little toughness. Instead, we have become a nation of couch potatoes that wusses out of the sports we used to do in summer camp as kids.

This wussification also explains why we have faced scandal after scandal on Wall Street.

Americans as a whole do nothing more than shrug their shoulders and grumble; even as the scandals only grow larger and larger.

It started with the savings and loan crisis in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, and then came the overhyping of the tech bubble in 1999 and 2000.

Then it got really big, with the largest drop in economic output since the Great Depression, all because of Wall Street greed and government regulators asleep at the switch or coaxed into a drunken stupor by Washington lobbyists.

With the housing crisis, we have seen predatory lending, fraud, forgery, robo-signing, tax evasion, and the wrongful eviction of homeowners from their own homes in such large amounts that even the bankers should be blushing.
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How Will the Libor Scandal Impact Main Street?

Monday, July 30th, 2012

Roy Oppenheim’s commentary was originally published on Yahoo! Homes and is being republished on South Florida Law Blog with their permission.

Corner of Housing Avenue and Market StreetThe residential real estate market is beginning to show real signs of life.

Home values have posted their first annual increase in nearly five years, acccording to the latest Zillow index, which is a well-respected year-over-year analysis of the sale of similar homes in the same area.

So we may be getting closer to a healthier housing market for the first time since the bubble burst in 2008.

But then the Libor scandal came along and threw a gigantic wrench in the works.

On the surface, Libor might appear to solely be a Wall Street problem.

There is no easy target for the populace to vilify, as there is with the HSBC money laundering investigation. And the damage done by the banks’ apparent attempts to subjugate Libor to their own benefit, at first glance, might appear to be limited to the banks themselves.

Perhaps that is why outrage over Libor hasn’t yet reached critical mass. But make no mistake; the impact of the scandal could be larger than any of the banking scandals that have come before it.

This is very much a Main Street issue. As the investigation continues, we may learn how homeowners were burdened with distorted mortgage rates.

What is Libor?

Libor stands for London Interbank Offered Rate. Simply put, Libor is the rate banks use to charge each other money.

The banks help set it, and it’s basically the starting point for lending rates, including a large percentage of mortgage interest rates here in the United States.
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