Matthew Mitchell:

While the bailouts of hundreds of firms in 2008 are, for many, the most prominent example of cronyism in modern American history, they are only the tip of the iceberg. Bailouts are but one example in a long list of privileges that governments give to particular businesses and industries.

John Lanchester:

“Dead peasants insurance” is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true. Here’s an example of what it means: in 1999, Michael Rice, a 48-year-old employee of the supermarket firm Walmart, collapsed while helping a customer carry a television to her car. He died a week later, and an insurance company paid out $300,000 for the loss of his life.
So far, a sad but not unusual story; the twist was in the identity of the people who benefited from the insurance. It wasn’t Rice’s family, who didn’t get a penny, but Walmart. In a subsequent lawsuit, it turned out that Walmart had hundreds of thousands of such policies on employees, so every time one of them died, the huge corporation enjoyed a tiny windfall. And that’s dead peasants insurance, or, as it is also known, “janitors insurance”. They are forms of what the insurance industry calls Stoli, or “stranger originated life insurance” – in other words, an insurance policy taken out on your life by someone else, not on your behalf but on theirs.

grok.se:

Matt Taibbi:

The furor is over revelations that Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and other banks were monkeying with at least $10 trillion in loans (The Wall Street Journal is calculating that that LIBOR affects $800 trillion worth of contracts).



The banks gamed LIBOR for two semi-overlapping reasons. As noted here last week, there were instances of Barclays traders badgering the LIBOR submitters to “push down” rates in order to fatten their immediate bottom lines, depending on what they were trading or holding that day. They also apparently rigged LIBOR downward in order to produce a general appearance of better health, essentially tweaking their credit scores a few ticks upward.



Most intriguingly, or perhaps disturbingly, there were revelations last week that Bank of England deputy Governor Paul Tucker had a conversation with Diamond at the peak of the crisis in 2008. The conversation reportedly left Diamond, and subsequently his traders, with the impression that the bank had carte blanche to rig LIBOR downward in order to help allay spiraling public fears about the banks’ poor financial health.

Sudden Debt:

Given what is going on in the eurozone at the moment, it is worth it to point out that the biggest beneficiary of the euro is Germany itself – and by very, very far.

F-Secure:

Have you ever wondered just how much your phone reveals about you?

That’s what Green party politician Malte Spitz wanted to discover…



A 2008 German law required all telecommunications providers with more than 10,000 customers to retain six months worth of data on all calls, messages and connections. Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 2010.



Spitz acquired (meta)data from his telecom provider covering a period from August 2009 to February 2010. Zeit Online has made the raw data available via Google Docs. To demonstrate just how much of a personal profile can be crafted, Zeit Online augmented the data with publicly available information such as Spitz’s tweets and blog entries.

The Telegraph:

An anonymous insider from one of Britain’s biggest lenders – aside from Barclays – explains how he and his colleagues helped manipulate the UK’s bank borrowing rate. Neither the insider nor the bank can be identified for legal reasons.

It was during a weekly economic briefing at the bank in early 2008 that I first heard the phrase. A sterling swaps trader told the assembled economists and managers that “Libor was dislocated with itself”. It sounded so nonsensical that, at first, it just confused everyone, and provoked a little laughter.



Before long, though, I was drawing up presentations to explain the “dislocation of Libor from itself” for corporate relationship managers. I was deciphering the subject in emails, internally and externally. And I was using the phrase myself openly with customers of the bank.



What I was explaining was that the bank was manipulating Libor. Only I didn’t see it like that at the time.

Jonathan Ford:

For a country that constantly extols the virtues of its large and prosperous financial sector, Britain can sometimes seem curiously inept at providing basic banking services.

This is not just a question of the everyday niggles that irk the average high-street banking customer: the monstrous charges levied on simple products, for instance, or the seemingly endless wait to get through to operatives at remote call-centres. There is also the rolling barrage of mis-selling scandals. The latest involved banks selling duff derivatives to their business customers. And to this “plain vanilla” malpractice has now been added a subgenre of even subtler scams, such as Barclays’ tweaking of the London interbank offered rate – a key interest rate for banks.

Conor Friedersdorf:

If you told the average American that there was a very powerful politician who, after leaving office, tried to speak out when his conscience was bothered by the actions of his fellow political insiders; if you told them that he abandoned partisanship, calling out even members of his own political tribe; if you told them that he said what he thought to be true even when it was uncomfortable, even when it lost him friends, even when it was seen as a betrayal by other powerful people, who shunned him; if you told Americans all that, you would think they’d express admiration for the mystery man.



Yet few celebrate Jimmy Carter.



He criticizes America. People don’t like that.



Here’s his latest critique, published in The New York Times:

Zeynep Tufekci:

Wow. Datagrid spokesperson says they have matched 80% of offline voter records to an online cookie. She’s proud. I’m worried. #pdf12

via the “Personal Democracy Forum” 2012.