Description: Economics, public policy, monetary policy, financial regulation, with a New Zealand perspective
In the years after the financial crises of 2008/09 one often read plaintive cries of “and who went to prison?”, and angry claims that the system was rigged. I can’t say that I was ever much moved by such lines. We simply don’t – or shouldn’t – generally imprison people for being bad at the business they are in, whether it is banking or baking, even if the businesses themselves were big, and the people concerned had employers who’d previously paid them lots (and lots) of money.
There has been a plethora of books about aspects of that crisis period. Glancing along my bookshelves just now I counted 100 or more, most of which I’ve read. Some were very analytical, some were lively descriptions of some aspect or other of that period, some country-specific, some more general, some were more about policy and policy institutions, some more about bankers and financial markets, but not one of them disconcerted me (and that is putting it very mildly) in the way that Rigged , a new book by BB
The context is the so-called “LIBOR crisis”. For readers who followed that story over the last decade, much of what follows won’t be new, especially if you’ve been in the UK. But I hadn’t really, because it seemed to be mostly a moral/political panic, in the “why aren’t evil bankers in prison?” vein. And, to be honest, from what little I had read of the story, I knew that I’d observed stuff in the little New Zealand markets in my years in the Reserve Bank’s Financial Markets Department that, if you were con
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