Bill Moyers: Sheila Bair on Keeping Banks Honest

Welcome, Every day brings another reminder of the awful unfairness that besets our country. Here's the latest that leaped out at me: "Rolling Stone's" report on "The Fallen", the sharp, sudden decline of America's middle class. In it Jeff Tietz describes a handful of everyday people made homeless, now living out of their cars in church parking lots in southern California. Once upon a time, one of them, Janie Adkins, had a plant nursery business in Utah that grossed $300,000 annually, but two years after the financial meltdown in 2008, sales had dropped by half, and the value of her land even more. She tried to refinance, but four banks turned her down flat - four banks. Makes you wonder about all those big time bankers at the other side of the scale, the ones who came running to the government and taxpayers for bailouts worth hundreds of billions of dollars, then scooped up big bonuses and perks for themselves, and went back to business as usual. And what a business! You've surely been hearing about the newest scandal in banking, centering on Barclay's Bank in London and something called "Libor." That stands for London Interbank Offered Rate, and it involves a group of bankers who set a daily interest rate, affecting trillions of dollars of transactions around the world. Your home mortgage, your college debt, your credit card fees, these could have been affected by Libor. It turns out some of those insiders were manipulating the index for their own gain, to make their bank look better off during the financial crisis, to lower their borrowing cost and raise their profits. Picking our pockets, lining theirs. "The Economist" magazine describes it as "the rotten heart of finance." Here are some of the emails that have come to light: One banker in on the fix writes another,"Dude, I owe you big time! Come over one day after work, and I'm opening a bottle of Bollinger."