Barclays views it as imperative that the market has access to Benchmarks that are well constructed, transparent and that inspire the confidence of other market participants and regulators…

You can say that again.

Some (more) Libor reading landed this week — the responses from banks, and other cogs and gears of the market, to a recent report by Iosco about reforming financial benchmarks. Everyone from Thomson Reuters to the European Central Bank, Blackrock to Calpers, has weighed in here.

Though the funny thing about Wednesday’s RBS revelations is that attempts at manipulation generally, at least at the start, weren’t written down. The whole problem was that people trading rates were sat right next to people in charge of submitting rates for Libor. That’s due to the “Short-Term Markets Desk”, RBS management’s October 2006 bid to “facilitate more communication”. Oops.

As we keep hearing, RBS’s level of involvement in the rate-rigging scandal is somewhere between Barclays, which got a nonprosecution agreement and paid $460m in penalties, and UBS, which paid $1.6bn and had to agree to having a Japanese subsidiary plead guilty to criminal charges.

Also, yikes! RBS (or specifically, an Asian unit of RBS) might have to plead guilty to some criminal charges if the US prosecutors have their way, says the WSJ.

Shockingly RBS does not like this. But… RBS may not have any choice:

Full FT story here. (The FT joined other media organisations in challenging the anonymity.)

Anyway…

Of course other banks did and do trade rates, in size, but let’s cut straight to the WSJ graphic…