Today, Treasury Secretary Geithner will meet with Bank of England Deputy Governor Paul Tucker.
They are perhaps meeting to get their stories straight on LIBOR. In July 2012, a memo released by WSJ suggested that Tucker may have implicitly pressured Barclays to manipulate its Libor submissions by relaying a message from senior members of the U.K. government that "it did not always need to be the case that [Barclays] appeared as high as [Barclays] has recently."
Could their be any other reason for Geithner to be meeting with a flunky deputy, who was passed over for the position of Governor of the Bank of England in favor of then Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney?
That memo at the end was dated October 29, 2008. TARP was signed into law on October 3, 2008, with $350 billion or so moving at or about the same date. Those funds were priced off Libor, so if Libor was misrepresented (and low, relative to real market rates) taxpayers were getting underpaid. They may have been underpaid for other reasons, too, to be sure.
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