> Mr Johnson objects, saying that this would mean breaking the rules for setting Libor, which required him to put in rates based only on the cost of borrowing cash.

There's a huge difference between "hey, this form is asking for my home phone number, I can't put cell phone number in!", and "I'm going to go to prison for years for this!". If Johnson had a clue that the behaviour being discussed would lead to prison time (and it has) he'd have made a very different objection.

> Also, it's been news to me that the Bank of England was actively pushing for the LIBOR rates to go down

Well, it hadn't been proven, but it's been talked about for years. Eg, this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...

Of course, whether you trust Barclay's about this is another question. :)

You have to be the world's biggest idiot to believe anything a huge corporation like that says. They have entire propaganda units to make them look as good as possible.

Breaking rules != serious issues

People speed all the time, no one thinks twice about it. They know they're speeding, they know they're breaking the rules, but the culture they're in doesn't care. I don't know enough about LIBOR rates in banking culture, but it seems possible this is a similar situation.

Well in banking, it's very important that there's trust in the system. Senior staff in UK financial institutions risk being barred from the industry if they're found to have broken rules and there's a reason that kind of penalty is in play.

Libor rates are quite serious as the outcome of trades depends on them. Each trade has a "winner" and a "loser" so if one side can choose the outcome they're essentially cheating the other side out of money.

The equivalent would be going to a casino where they can arbitrarily change the odds of winning to suit them, during the game.

> Breaking rules != serious issues

In a nutshell, this is why we're seeing all these financial scandals and stockmarket melt-downs every so many years. Because the perception has become that if you break the rules it is not a serious issue, no matter what level of society you are operating at.

If you start equating speeding with breaking banking rules something is fundamentally wrong (not that speeding is ok, but the impact of say going 10 km over the limit versus wrecking the economy seems to be of a qualitatively different level).

Not all rules & rule violations are created equal — embezzling money is different than deleting an innocuous email. Also, 'rules' don't mean 'legal requirement' necessarily.

Deleting an innocuous email became a rule violation because of all the times a substantive email was deleted under the cover of allegedly being innocuous.

Too good an argument since it also justifies the subprime mortgage scandal, and more.