So this fellow, and others like him, allegedly found ways to fudge the London Interbank Offered Rate, one of many widgets in the global financial system. LIBOR, however, acts as a base rate for such a multitude of financial products that its manipulation could inflate a bank’s profit at the expense of its lenders, as the bank passed on illusory “increased borrowing costs.”  Such illusions are enabled by the financial sector’s thick web of extremely complex financial instruments whose hidden, often unintended, levers await discovery and manipulation by ambitious functionaries looking to make a name, and a bonus, for themselves.  There was less room for this when we had our economy centered on making things.