While everyone has been fixated on whether Barclays (along with numerous other banks) tried to manipulate Libor, nobody seems to be particularly bothered that UK base rates have been routinely manipulated by the Bank of England for years. And when the Bank has not been formally responsible for the base rate, the Government of the day (or its Chancellor) has. Headline policy interest rates have always been a political plaything, nudged higher or lower as "required", which normally means lower ahead of an election.

We have been used to this political interference for so long that we take it for granted. So there is mass hysteria over the shock revelation that banks are self-interested rent-seekers, and none whatsoever over the fundamentally distorted monetary infrastructure that underpins the interest rate-setting process in the first place. Interest rates are not set by any free market in any remote sense of the word, they are a tool of Government. But when our banks have blown themselves up, the manipulation of interest rates (to 300 year lows) effectively becomes a tool that forcibly impoverishes savers in order to perpetuate a broken banking system.

David Fuller's view Both witty and apt, I commend this issue to subscribers.