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July 5, 2012
Barclays' claim: "we’re dirty-clean, rather than clean-clean"
Atlantic Yards Report
According to the Huffington Post, branding experts don't think the stigma facing Barclays will last, or Barclays Bank Scandal Unlikely To Taint Brooklyn Nets' Fresh Start. So one p.r. expert:
"I think on both the NBA totem pole and in New York professional sports, the Nets don't exactly rank very well in terms of brand value or brand awareness, so Barclays won't really make it worse for them."
But maybe those following the Barclays Center will remember some choice bits, such as from today's New York Times, Barclays C.E.O. Resigns as Bank Frames a Defense:
When Barclays bank manipulated key interest rates to bolster profits during the 2008 financial crisis, senior executives said they were following a common practice that regulators implicitly approved, according to documents released by the bank and authorities.
...Even as [top executives] resigned, Barclays published documents indicating that some executives thought they were responding to an implied directive from the Bank of England, Britain’s central bank.
Investigators disagree, saying that Barclays "never explicitly told regulators that it was reporting false interest rates that amounted to manipulation," and the bank has been charted with helping other banks do the same thing.
Related content...
The Huffington Post, Barclays Bank Scandal Unlikely To Taint Brooklyn Nets' Fresh Start
The curse of the naming rights continues. Just as the Brooklyn Nets are about to settle into the brand-new Barclays Center, the bank for which the NBA team's arena is named has plunged into scandal. The British bank has been ordered to pay $450 million in fines for manipulating global interest rates and several executives have resigned.
...Liz Goodgold of Redfire Branding echoed Shankman. "It’s important to remember that this is not front-page news outside of the finance community," she said. "More Americans, for example, are aware and intrigued by the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes split than in the nuances of this brouhaha."
NoLandGrab: And that's what makes America such a great nation.
NY Times Deal B%k, Barclays C.E.O. Resigns as Bank Frames a Defense
In one call on April 2008, a Barclays manager acknowledged to the Financial Services Authority that the bank was understating its Libor submissions. “So, to the extent that, um, the Libors have been understated, are we guilty of being part of the pack? You could say we are,” the Barclays manager said, according to regulatory documents.
“I would sort of express us maybe as not clean clean, but clean in principle.”
Or, as one Barclays official told the British Bankers Associations, the organization that oversees Libor, “we’re clean but we’re dirty-clean, rather than clean-clean.”
NLG: If you don't thin it's cool for Brooklyn's biggest transit hub to carry the name of a "dirty-clean" interest-rate rigging bank, add your name to this petition asking the MTA to scotch the deal that changed the name of the Atlantic Av-Pacific St station.
Posted by eric at July 5, 2012 10:44 AM