Weekend Reading: July 6, 2012 - SmartBrief

All Articles Finance Modern Money Weekend Reading: July 6, 2012

Weekend Reading: July 6, 2012

2 min read

Modern Money

News and analyses worth a read this weekend …

The Guardian offers up this interactive data set that shows London Interbank Offered Rate submissions from every bank from 2005 to 2008. Cross-referencing the data with this Financial News timeline sheds some light on what was going on in the markets in the days and weeks before a now-infamous phone call Oct. 30, 2008, between former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond and Bank of England Deputy Governor Paul Tucker.

TIME magazine offers one possible explanation for the trading follies of Wall Street: human biology.

It looks like The Wall Street Journal espoused the virtues of credit default swaps: “CDS served as the market reality check on Libor. The rising spreads on bank CDS — expressing the market view that bank default risks were rising — formed the core of a 2008 Journal analysis that suggested banks were not accurately reporting their borrowing rates for Libor. We don’t expect [Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary] Gensler to give CDS their due, but we’d trust CDS and open markets to judge the health and integrity of banks much better than Washington’s regulators.”

The New York Times details how some with dreams of working on Wall Street are ending up in the Beehive State: “Low-level jobs have already migrated to call centers and back offices overseas, while top-end traders and bankers are secure in the New York area, experts say. Instead, services like accounting, trading and legal support, and human resources and compliance are being shifted to places like Salt Lake City, North Carolina and Jacksonville, Fla.”