Ok, so I come from an audit and compliance background and work in corporate governance risk management for the institutional clients section of one of the banks, so I can't speak to everything. I'm not a banker or a trader. It is totally about anti-trust. The minuscule variance in the exchange rates caused by this would only affect companies or governments that were engaging in transactions totaling millions to billions of dollars. All the same, they broke the law, and shit on their employers. Reputation risk is a really big deal for such organizations. Mega banks don't like having their names in the headlines.

As to the LIBOR rigging, I think that was a Goldman Sachs thing and I haven't had much time to read about it.

Adjustable rate mortgages are a crap product, people who take out ARMs are both being victimized and most likely not that financially adept. The bank I work for tries to limit its exposure to that kind of crap. It bit us hard in 2008 and the current plan is to reduce residential real estate and HELOC portfolios (for the record I have only been with bank for about a year).

My point was that, redditors upon reading this headline immediately condemned all of the banks (and capitalism and probably a whole lot more) based upon zero knowledge of the facts other than their hive mind idea that banks are evil. They're not. They play a vital role in the global economy. If they had access to the banking books for any one of these banks, do you know who their biggest obligor would be? The government of the United States of America.

The bad acts of a few morons shouldn't be taken as the normal course of business. These companies spend a shit ton of money to prevent things like this from happening. This manipulation of exchange rates had zero impact on anybody commenting and still I read that I should be put in jail despite that it is my job to help find these sorts of problems and prevent them from happening. Sorry for the rant, I had a bad day.