The Takeaway from LIBOR: Break Up the Big Banks, Study Finds

Bank Systems Technology, August 23, 2012. Copyright © 2012 UBM TechWeb. All Rights Reserved.

The LIBOR scandal clearly indicates that banks have grown too large to effectively regulate, a new study by Bard College’s Levy Economics Institute claims. The report emphasizes the need for structural changes to the banks and rejects the idea that a failure by Bank of England officials and regulators to respond to alerts of LIBOR’s manipulation are at fault for the scandal, a statement from the institute said.

The Levy Institute’s Senior Scholar Jan Kregel, who authored the report, titled “The LIBOR Scandal: The Fix Is In—The Bank of England Did It,” compared the scandal with JPMorgan’s trading losses fiasco earlier this year. Kregel said that in both cases the response has been to point the finger at individuals involved instead of looking at any institutional changes that need to be made to the big banks. “The rotten apples have been removed without anyone noticing that it is the barrel that is the cause of the problem,” Kregel wrote.