WHY NOT MANIPULATE LIBOR?

so the latest financial scandal is about banks manipulating LIBOR. it will be interesting to see what comes out. but a little perspective. in 1991 Salomon Brothers was caught putting false bids into a Treasury auction to get a greater allocation and likely caused a distortion in the Treasury yield curve. they were fined $290 million dollars and got warren buffett as a opportunistic, savior. interestingly enough there was little litigation. i thought at the time there were fun lawsuits to be made given the zillions of dollars of securities that were price off the curve. now we have libor. well this time the lawyers figured it out and there will be plenty of lawsuits. ah, for simpler times! anyway, to my point. ever since 2008 when the financial crisis really hit, governments around the world have been manipulating interest rates and yield curves. what do you think QE, quantitative easing, does? it is governments buying securities for the explicit purpose of changing interest rates to try to change behavior. at this point the entire treasury yield curve is manipulated. there is nothing market based about it. unless you define the market as one influenced by all players including governments. which i guess we should, its the new normal. back to libor. we will find out what various banks did; maybe why. but i will tell you something. the Bank of England knew that the libor quotes were bs. you have to try to remember that the world financial system was close to meltdown. banks weren't actually lending to each other. libor was a joke. there was no market; there was no rate at which they would lend to each other. and all the central banks didnt want to have that visible and scare the hell out of everyone. lastly, in a world of manipulated rates, why pick on the bankers? they were merely doing what all the governments and central banks around the world were doing!