This is the single best discussion and explanation of the LIBOR scandal you’re likely to get.

Simply put, LIBOR — the London Interbank Offered Rate — is the rate that banks lend money to each other and it directly impacts virtually everyone in the world.

The 16 banks that set the LIBOR have been gaming a system worth literally hundreds of trillions of dollars and their fraud and criminality has cost people with home loans, business loans, student loans, credit cards . . . you name it, quite literally trillions of dollars in losses.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — this shit isn’t going to stop until some of these motherfuckers are hanging from a gibbet in the middle of the town square.

“Oh, wow — another bank bailout, this time in Spain. Who could have predicted that?

The answer, of course, is everybody. In fact, the whole story is starting to feel like a comedy routine: yet again the economy slides, unemployment soars, banks get into trouble, governments rush to the rescue — but somehow it’s only the banks that get rescued, not the unemployed.”

Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

Soooooo the Spanish government is gonna give the big Spanish banks $125 billion to bail them out.  Again.

This while forcing even more austerity measures down the throats of Spain’s citizens. Many of whom — almost 25% of the population at this point — are currently out of work.

Nobel Prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz has gone on record saying that this new bailout is gonna fail utterly and completely.

And Stiglitz is one of those guys who, along with Paul Krugman, has been pretty much right about pretty much every damn thing over the past ten years or so.

So let’s do a little thought experiment, shall we?

If the Spanish government were to take that $125 billion that they intend to piss down the toilet bailing out the banks {again!}, and instead took that money and gave it to the 5.6 million unemployed in their country — they would be able to give every single one of those unemployed people almost $25,000 dollars.

Or almost the equal of a year’s wages for the average Spaniard.

That’s money that those unemployed people would then be able to spend on shit like food, rent, clothing etc., and would act as an immediate and incredible stimulus to their moribund economy.

Because in Economics 101 you learn that every dollar spent on unemployment benefits puts almost $2 into the economy.

But the government will never do that because of a concept called “moral hazard”. Which is a concept meaning you don’t want to reward bad behavior. Because it begets more bad behavior.

And since most governments tend to view being unemployed as a moral failing they’d thus much rather bail out a bank — repeatedly — even though previous bailouts failed and will continue to fail {and even though the banks are wholly responsible for the mess they’re in and are even more subject to moral hazard than individuals} than do something constructive that will actually help the people they’re supposed to help.

Instead what the government is going to do is bail out the banks {again!} which will do nothing to help the economy and, even worse, the politicos who are bailing out the banks will accede to the demands being made by the European central bankers and the German government that they increase the austerity measures that their citizens are now suffering under.

Measures that have failed by every metric and will continue to fail and continue to not just damage the Spanish economy but bring unnecessary pain to the Spanish people.

And now I’m gonna tell you how this is all going to end — its going to end with people grabbing pitchforks and torches and with some form of improvised public hangings, that’s how.

Or at least that’s how it should end.

And the faster it happens the better off the Spanish people will be.

Paul Krugman went on Brit tee vee and absolutely annihilated two conservatard austerians who were repeating over and over how what we need is even more austerity in order to fix the world economy.

This even though the austerity that people like these two fools demand has demonstrably failed — and in fact made the economic conditions markedly worse by every single metric.

Krugman very correctly points out that what these two assholes want to accomplish is not to end the current world economic crisis, but instead to use that crisis in order to accomplish their goal of shrinking government by gutting social programs for the poor and working class and reducing taxes on the very rich.

And can I say that I’m gonna fucking kill someone if I hear one more person say that what these kids coming out of college need is not to have jobs waiting for them, “but to have an environment conducive to entrepreneurship in which they can start their own businesses.”

What fucking planet do these people live on?

Because nobody — and I mean NOBODY — coming out of college with a mountain of debt is gonna be starting a business unless that business is a recreational drug peddling business.

And here’s why:

Because it costs an enormous amount of money to start a legitimate business, that’s why.

As you know, I’m in the process of starting a business and we’re not even open yet or finished with construction and already we’ve spent well in excess of a million bucks.

WELL in excess!

And we’re doing this without any bank financing — ya know why?

Because the fucking banks aren’t lending money for new business start-ups, that’s why.

Not even to longtime banking customers with seven figure accounts.

So how exactly, may I ask, is a 21 year old kid coming out of college who’s carrying $100,000+ in debt going to start a new business as these two fucking douchebags suggest?

Magic?

If you live in Wisconsin you need to get your ass to the polls this morning to vote and vote often.

Recalling Scott Walker — the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin — is job one in America this morning.

Scumbags like the Koch brothers and casino mongrel Sheldon Adelson have pumped literally tens of millions of dollars into buying Walker so that he can destroy organized labor in Wisconsin and turn back the clock on the working class to the 19th century.

All this while the state during Walker’s so-called “republican job creating” tenure has lost more jobs than any other state in the nation.

The 2010 race that put Walker into office was a low turnout race that he won by just 5 points over Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.  With Walker and Barrett facing off once again, and now polling in  a statitistical tie — after seeing Barrett trail for the past month — the momentum is with Barrett and a high turnout should swing the race in his direction.

Either way this fucker is shaping up to probably be razor thin close — so if you’re a Badger State voter and you haven’t voted yet then get the fuck out there and do it and send the message that this kid here is sending.

“Celebrating rich people getting richer as though it had anything to do with the rest of us marks us as suckers of the highest order. Cheering a stock as though it were a living entity worthy of praise marks us as the worst kind of primitive economic bone-worshippers.”

Charles Pierce commenting on the absolutely ludicrous spectacle on Friday of people around the country — including crowds standing in Times Square — cheering on the Facebook IPO as if it were some sort of national triumph along the lines of the Apollo 11 moon landing or winning World War II.

Go read Charlie’s entire blog post because it perfectly sums up how well and truly fucked  in the head we are as a nation.

“If J.P. Morgan Chase wants to act like a crazed cowboy hedge fund and make wild exacta bets on the derivatives market, they should be welcome to do so. But they shouldn’t get to do it with cheap cash from the Fed’s discount window, and they shouldn’t get to do it with money from the federally-insured bank accounts of teachers, firemen and other such real people. It’s a simple concept: you either get to be a bank, or you get to be a casino. But you can’t be both. If we don’t have rules to enforce that concept, we ought to get some.”

Taibbi on the news this week that JP Morgan Chase lost at least $2 billion while gambling on risky derivatives.

This is why the Obama White House and Tim Geithner need to be held to account for being far too accommodating to these fucking crooked and incompetent bankers who blew up the world economy.

Bankers like Chase’s Jamie Dimon who want to use taxpayer money to gamble with and then, when it all blows up in their faces, they comes crying to the Treasury Department with their piggy little fingers out for more free money while whining about being “too big to fail.”

I’m telling you, this shit would stop most ricky fucking tick if we just hanged a few of these fuckers in the public square.

Ed over at Gin and Tacos has a friend whose company is in financial difficulties and has found itself unable to meet payroll so has stopped paying its employees and has, as of this writing, missed issuing several paychecks to its workers.

Ed has advised his friend to stop working until he gets paid — this on the theory that if, during good times, the friend were to simply stop coming to work his paychecks would cease most ricky fucking tick — but the friend, as well as all the other workers from the company, keep going to work in spite of there being no paychecks on the horizon.

As Ed put it,

“The contract between employee and employer, formal or otherwise, is simple: they pay us and we work. If we don’t work they certainly aren’t going to pay us. The inverse of that statement does not always hold, however. When one works for a smaller company, I understand that there is a stronger sense of, “Well if we all make a sacrifice now we can right the ship and then payroll will be back to normal. If we all quit, the company will definitely go under.” That makes some sense. Up to a point. Inevitably, however, the reality of having bills to pay can no longer be ignored.

{snip}

 How did we get like this? I mean, despite some aspects of this reaction being understandable, from a distance this looks like pure insanity. Battered Worker Syndrome at its finest. If our ancestors were brought here in a time machine and we tried to explain that sometimes Americans work without getting paid – either “off the clock” overtime or work in the complete absence of paychecks – they would return to their time convinced that people in the future are all insane.”

Both Ed and I want to know the same thing — has this ever happened to any of you?

And if so, did you tell your employer that if he doesn’t pay you you won’t come to work?

And if not why not?