While some details are new, the charges are not. Two whistleblowers, one that worked at Countrywide, and another that worked for a lending unit under contract with B of A, have made similar allegations in the past. Nor has this behavior been limited to B of A and fellows Citigroup (NYSE: C ) , JMPorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM ) , Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC ) , and Ally Financial, the signatories of the $25 billion National Mortgage Settlement. Last year, a former employee of Litton Loan Servicing told ProPublica how that company, working for Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS ) , routinely engaged in "denial sweeps," in order to reduce the backlog of cases.''

HSBC said it cannot comment on specific regulatory matters. In its annual report released in March, the bank noted that it was subject to a number of regulatory proceedings on benchmark rate submissions in the UK, United States, Canada, the European Union, Switzerland and Asia.''

What we have is effectively the entire financial community (backed by the entire choir of the Corporate Media) engaging in a George Soros-like "bash and buy" in the gold market. But it goes much deeper than that; bringing us back to the word "desperation."

Concerns about the bank's capital arose after a deal with Lloyds collapsed.

In April, the Co-op cancelled a plan to buy 631 bank branches from Lloyds Banking Group.

...

Most of Co-op Bank's problems stem from bad loans associated with its takeover of Britannia Building Society in 2009.

Yet even after the recent price weakness gold is up 500 per cent in the past decade and stocks would have hardly made you a dime except for some paltry dividends. As an investor inflation has wiped you out in stocks and made you rich in bullion.

...

Anybody being suckered in by Wall Street now is buying in at the top of a trend which is actually showing the first signs of a major reversal. Valuations are already twice the levels of European stocks.

...

"It's happened time and again: all of these markets have been influenced by major market-makers, which is a polite way of saying they've been rigged," Charles Geisst, a finance professor at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, said in a telephone interview.

He's also an outspoken critic of the Basel III rules - introduced globally after the crisis - which he says do not do enough to reduce the size of the riskiest banks and are easy for them to game.''

...

Frankly, I view the present course of monetary policy as reckless - not because it threatens inflation (which I don't think it will for several years), but because it diverts scarce capital away from productive investment and toward speculative activities; because it fails to act on any economic constraint that is actually binding here, so has little hope of providing the economic "support" that it purports to offer; because decades of historical evidence provide no basis to expect a material "wealth effect" from stock values to the economy; because the policy lowers hurdle rates and encourages borrowing for unproductive purposes - including stock buybacks at record highs (and there is no evidence that buybacks are a good indication of value); because it punishes the elderly on fixed incomes; because it perpetuates a bubble-bust cycle created by Fed intervention, which is not the medicine but the very poison itself; and because moving to the left on the liquidity preference curve will likely be as painful as moving to the right has been pleasant. Meanwhile, we'll continue along a studied, disciplined course over the remainder of this market cycle, considering a broad ensemble of evidence that has been validated across market cycles throughout history. Our views will change as that evidence does.

...

The dilemma now is that officials are in what Sylvester Eijffinger, a professor of financial economics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, likens to what old maps would call "terra incognita" -- the Latin for "unknown land."

In the case of the Fed, while good communications are vital for controlling markets, they're complicated by the officials themselves not knowing when to exit, disagreeing over the right timing to do so and political pressure to hold back.

You mean these hacks don't know what the !@$% they are doing? Big surprise around these parts. But we can see why markets would be a little upset at the revelation...

ING Groep NV (INGA), Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) and UBS AG (UBSN) were among 20 banks at which 133 traders tried to manipulate the Singapore interbank offered rate, swap offered rates and currency benchmarks in the city-state, the Monetary Authority of Singapore said in a statement yesterday. The regulator said it will also make rigging key rates a criminal offense and bring supervision under its direct oversight.