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I wouldn't know. If you asked me years ago why would anyone cook LIBOR, I wouldn't have known why or how. But such things happen. I think there is precedent for

I wouldn't know. If you asked me years ago why would anyone cook LIBOR, I wouldn't have known why or how. But such things happen. I think there is precedent for government figures on inflation being unreliable, (Argentina maybe?) so if you insist "it can't happen here" (in the USA) then it could be hubris, the assumption the US is just better than other countries. When organizational failures happen, they don't happen with full transparency or with the participation of everyone in a large organization as if it were one big pyramid. Some people compromise with their conscience, but many others are just trying to balance doing their job as they see it with keeping their manager happy. The dynamics of sub-organizations depend on their directors and how much autonomy they have.

credit_guy 6y ago
> if you insist "it can't happen here" (in the USA) It can certainly happen. But absent some obvious incentives, I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt. (The Libor manipulation was done by people employed by the private sector, who had their career advances and their compensation linked to the way the Libor was marked.) You are right that some non-obvious group dynamics can happen in Government organizations, but based on this generic statement alone, we should refrain to accepting any conspiracy theory without at least a modest amount of intellectual due diligence.