Again, that seems unlikely right now, but the uncertainty is huge, as you can see from the fact that places like The Economist are quoting experts about possible bailouts. It’s not like people trust the banks’ books anyway. As Jonathan Weil points out, Barclays “trades for a mere 37 percent of its common shareholder equity, which shows that investors believe most of its 55.6 billion pounds of book value is fictional.”
The legal liability will all take years to sort out, and the revelations and settlements with regulators seem just to have begun.
Kevin Drum popped in with a few comments:
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/07/libor-scandal-might-destroy-banking-industry
"Roughly speaking, the view from inside Barclays is that they're being treated unfairly. They cooperated, after all, and they say that other banks were way more involved in the LIBOR-fixing scam than they were. If that's true, one of two things will happen. Either this scandal will explode way beyond the financial press, where it's mostly played out so far. Or it will turn out that declining to cooperate makes it really hard to prosecute the other banks and Barclays will look like idiots for doing so. I'm not sure which to put my money on."
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 6 Jul 2012 at 08:16 PM