Plausible Deniability

“No matter what promises you make on the campaign trail - blah, blah, blah - when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist, capitalist scumfucks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down... and it's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before, which looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll.... And then the screen comes up, the lights come on, and they say to the new president, 'Any questions?'

"Just what my agenda is."

-          Bill Hicks

So the great LIBOR scandal deepens. Now it appears the BoE influenced BARC to report a lower rate to help restore ‘confidence’ in the ponzi banking system. But strangely nobody can remember or recall the exact details of the conversation between Bobbie and the bank. Quelle surprise! The BoE and the banks were colluding to appear to still have clothes…go back to bed shorting speculators, your central bank is in control.

Bob diamond plays the usual CEO ignorance by blaming lowly traders – if they are so lowly why are they handling something so important?

It smells of bullshit and right on cue an ‘insider’ provides the vital clue which usually heralds a big pile of bull – convoluted news-speak;

“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.”
- The Telegraph

Bobbie’s ignorance reminds me of Dickie Fuld and Lehman’s Repo 105 accounting fraud. Fuld claimed that he was unaware of the Repo 105 transactions and the spreadsheets of these transactions which were sent to him since apparently he did not have a computer and can’t open attachments on his Blackberry. Now this could almost be credible if he is as technologically retarded as many of those fine old gentelemen of his generation but it does raise the specter of negligence - how the fuck did he do his job?

Claiming ignorance of everything is a great tactic employed by the mafia for many generations. The boss is never caught making a direct instruction or report. All orders are communicated by innuendo through a chain of command to preserve any boss from direct indictment. 

I used to think the judgement of medieval witches was a terrible injustice. You bound them and threw them in the river. If they drowned they were innocent and if they floated they were witches and were burned at the stake. In the case of bank directors I think a similar trial technique would be equally effective. Anybody with a grain of sense knows these chaps are as guilty as OJ Simpson but time and again they employ some implausible deniability to save their skins and the bank shareholders take the hit.

Bobbie’s gotta go.

I like to see my disgraced former banks fronted by men who are now suffering interminable hell be it Horta Osorio' s mental breakdown as the head of the headless horse or Hester losing all his hair. The sight of Bobbie’s fake plastic America veneers has all the sparkling arrogance of Simon Cowell’s face and it really grinds my gears…