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July 15, 2012
Will The Empire State Development Corporation (ESD), The MTA, NYC And New York State Sue Barclays Bank?
Noticing New York
Baltimore is suing Barclays Bank!* The Barclays LIBOR lying scandal is big stuff. The LIBOR rate that Barclays was manipulating (LIBOR stands for”London interbank offered rate”) is such a critically important universally resorted to benchmark rate that there is scarcely a man, woman or entity in the world that was unaffected by the rates that Barclays manipulated. For some people it might be good when interest rates go down (or are manipulated in that direction) but there is always someone on the other side of any such equation (pensioners for example) for whom it is correspondingly bad. And if rates get manipulated up instead the same thing is true vice versa.
(* See also: Baltimore city is among many suing big banks over allegations of rate-rigging For small investors, this could be the scandal that finally breaks their trust, July 09, 2012, By Eileen Ambrose, The Baltimore Sun.)
So here is a tantalizing irony to mull over: Will New York’s Empire State Development agency ("ESD," formerly the Empire State Development Corporation- its name keeps changing to protect the. . .? ) choose to get in line behind the city of Baltimore to sue Barclays? ESD should have a legal cause of action against Barclays given that the ESD is a state finance agency involved in a great volume of complicated financial transactions in which the LIBOR rates must have been key. If ESDC sues Barclays it will be suing the bank whose name has been plastered on the ESD-sponsored Ratner/Prokhorov Nets basketball arena effected by ESD through eminent domain abuse and false-fact environmental reviews. “EMPIRE STATE DEVELOPMENT AGENCY SUES BARCLAYS!”: What a headline!
Posted by steve at July 15, 2012 6:56 PM