Libor Rigger - 14yrs in prison

You see the first sentencing for the LIBOR rigging scandal has come through. 14yrs to Tom Hayes (which in the UK is a very long time).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33763628

14yrs is a long time for something which seemed to structural to the fabric of the finance world at that time. From what he says, everyone was doing it and everyone new about it.

But that doesn’t let him escape blame though.

“Officer i was speeding becuase everyone else was” is not getting you out of a ticket

seems excessive, any executives in jail after the subprime meltdown?

14 years in longer in the UK than it is in the rest of the world?

Yes.

They don’t go on daylight savings time.

Exactly. That’s why these punishments don’t work. The fee needs to be known, and consistently applied, to act as a deterrent.

My idea for a financial-crime punishment system – use a published table, which references damage and punishment. So anything over $50M in financial damage to the society is death penalty, anything over $10M is life in prison, anything over $1M is 10 years. No excuses, no appeals; objective financial analysts do the calcs, and if you went over the limit, you get it. Simple math. Singapore-like hard core is proven to work. Right now they just play silly games, this won’t change anything; probability weighting says NPV is positive for financial crime.

absolutely - give back 20% of the illicit gains, other 20% to lawyers. suspension (vacation) for a few years and you get to chill with 60%.

Apparently he was paid 3.9 Mil. pounds from Citi in the 9 months until he was fired. Seems somewhat exessive for manipulating rates so I think the sentence is somewhat justified