Rigged

Rigged picks up where The Big Short leaves off, in the autumn of 2007, as the dark clouds of the financial crisis gather. Financial institutions enter a state of panic. For the Big 16 banks, their measure of health is an interest rate measure known as Libor (the London Interbank Offered Rate). The higher the Libor, the worse off the bank - too high and it's goodnight Vienna. Libor is heading skywards. To save themselves from collapse, nationalisation and loss of bonuses, banks and financial institutions conspire to rig Libor so it stays artificially low, a criminal practice known as lowballing. A handful of low-level traders, outraged after being ordered to rig Libor, turn whistleblowers, alerting the Wall Street Journal. When it proves impossible for the investigators to pin the crime on the banks themselves, they turn on the traders. They charge them with rigging interest rates for profit, a crime of which - as Rigged proves - they were innocent. 30 traders have been prosecuted at the time of writing, with 11 convicted, 13 acquitted and 6 on the run. They remain the only bankers jailed since the 2008 financial crisis - and they're innocent of the crimes of which they are accused. In fact, as Rigged exclusively shows, the crimes didn't even take place. These trials served as a distraction, allowing the real perpetrators - bank bosses and executives, the people who played havoc with ordinary people's money - to go unpunished. Innocent people jailed for years for doing the right thing, their lives ruined and families destroyed. One of the most spectacular miscarriages of justice the USA and UK have ever seen. How could this happen? Turns out, it's not just the market that's rigged - it's the entire system. AUTHOR: Andy Verity is the award-winning economics correspondent for BBC News, covering finance and business on the BBC radio and TV bulletins as well as reporting for Panorama, BBC Newsnight and BBC Radio 4's investigative strand, File on Four. He can currently be heard on the Today programme, Radio Four's six o'clock news and the BBC News TV channel reporting the worst economic crisis in 300 years caused by the pandemic - all the while knowing how much of the truth about the previous mega-crisis has been covered up and kept from the public. Joining the BBC from The Independent, he worked first as personal finance correspondent then as a presenter on BBC Radio Five Live, where for 8 years he hosted the BBC's daily financial radio programme and popular podcast Wake up to Money. Before the credit crunch struck in 2007 he proposed a TV series warning of the risks of an imminent crash in the housing market which became BBC2's The Truth About Property, attracting an unusually large audience; it was repeat-commissioned both before and after the crisis of 2008. Since being appointed economics correspondent in 2014, he's broadcast and published high-impact investigative stories including a Panorama film which revealed the Bank of England's role in the Libor scandal and a 2018 documentary exposing money laundering by a Ukrainian gangster, where he made headlines when one of the gangster's thugs kicked him in the groin. In a more recent film, Following the Drug Money, Andy exposed how global consultants EY covered up evidence of smuggling by an organised crime gang that was laundering the proceeds of sales of illegal drugs in the UK via the gold markets of Dubai. He lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife and daughter.