Ann Pettifor explains:
…after the Second World War, the finance sector recruited (directly or indirectly) economists, journalists and politicians to reverse Keynes’s monetary theories and policies…..
[Thank the London School of Economics for much of the defamation of Keynes from then on and]…….led ultimately to the victory of the economy’s robber barons……..the ecosystem, is once again subordinated to the interests of global finance.
The Production of Money
So ideas were put into action such as LIBOR (invented by Minos Zombanakis, banker, 1926-2019) . This concept was manipulated and led to the the banking sector rigging interest rates between them:
The most memorable incidents in earth-changing events are sometimes the most banal. In the rapidly spreading scandal of LIBOR (the London Interbank Offered Rate) it is the very everydayness with which bank traders set about manipulating the most important figure in finance. They joked, or offered small favours. ‘Coffees will be coming your way,’ promised one trader in exchange for a fiddled number. ‘Dude. I owe you big time! … I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger,’ wrote another. One trader posted diary notes to himself so that he wouldn’t forget to fiddle the numbers the next week. ‘Ask for High 6M Fix’, he entered in his calendar, as he might have put ‘Buy Milk’. What may still seem to many to be a parochial affair involving Barclays, a 300-year-old British bank, rigging an obscure number, is beginning to assume global significance. The number that the traders were toying with determines the prices that people and corporations around the world pay for loans or receive for their savings. It is used as a benchmark to set payments on about $800 trillion–worth of financial instruments, ranging from complex interest-rate derivatives to simple mortgages. The number determines the global flow of billions of dollars each year. Yet it turns out to have been flawed.
From ‘The LIBOR scandal’, Economist, July 2012.
This is the Timeline of the Scandal, illustrating how the small, tight community of bankers work together globally:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libor-rbs-scandal-idUSBRE9150TB20130206
The global banking sector consists of small, medium and large banks. Sometimes, as in the 2007-8 banking crisis, famous financial sector institutions collapsed, others were ‘bailed out’ by the taxpayer.
Some lists of banks around the world I found are shown below. They all interact with one another and form a banking ecosystem.
It was 1963 when Africa formed its group of banks:
The idea of an Association of African Central Banks was first introduced on May 25, 1963, at the Summit Conference of African Heads of State and Government held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In this regard, African Heads of State and Government unanimously agreed to set up a preparatory Economic Committee to study a large range of monetary and financial issues, in collaboration with Governments and in consultation with the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).
2023 list of 50 European Banks:
https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/largest-banks-europe-list/
2023 BANKS IN THE UNITED STATES
There are a 4836 local and national banks offering banking services in United States with nearly 77000 branches in 9922 cities.
https://www.bankbranchlocator.com/banks-in-usa.html
Many books and articles scrutinise the activities of the banking sector as they impact each and everyone of us, and the health of our planet. For example, Wall Street practices monitored here:
And what has been going on whilst we sleep?
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