Oh wow, so now you're insulting people who disagree with you? Impressive, makes me think even less of the big banks if one of them employed you, frankly. I don

Oh wow, so now you're insulting people who disagree with you? Impressive, makes me think even less of the big banks if one of them employed you, frankly. I don't see anything clumsy about my reasoning. The Libor scandal, for instance, is pretty clear-cut. The rate was set by, simplifying greatly, polling the banks and averaging. There is evidence that some of the banks misrepresented their actual cost of borrowing in order to further their own interests, and thus skewed the rate improperly. Is any of this in doubt? Now, it might not be the Illuminati secretly picking the president and ordering him to clone Hitler, but it sure does demonstrate that our market economy isn't quite as "market-ish" as we had hoped. That's a big problem in my book because the fundamental argument in favor of markets as a means of organizing economic activity is that they generate socially optimal outcomes. Otherwise, there's no reason for most of us to buy into the system, it's just feudalism (which economists and capitalists take great pride in having vanquished) all over again and most of us are still just serfs. If those markets are being manipulated, then are the outcomes socially optimal? Or, more specifically, are they more socially optimal than some other method of organizing things? If not, then the whole system is called into question, and that's a huge deal.