Free From Broke

America turned 236 years old this week, but in the financial markets that news was nothing compared to the scandal rocking London financial markets.

It came to light this week that Barclays — and potentially other mega banks — helped prop up or inflate the LIBOR rate over the past several years.

Why is LIBOR important?

It stands for London Interbank Offered Rate.  It is the rate that major banks can expect to be charged when they borrow money from another bank.  If a bank’s cost of borrowing was artificially higher than it should have been they would then have to charge their customers higher interest rates on loans.

In short, we all may have been paying slightly higher interest rates on every type of lending product because a few banks conspired together to artificially keep rates higher than they needed to be.

That’s big financial news.

The LIBOR scandal won’t provide any relief from your current loans and debts, but these articles just might help you:

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The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that, for the most part, they were siding with the healthcare law commonly referred to as Obamacare.

However, in an interesting twist they only agreed because Congress has the ability to create taxes, and to the Court, clearly the mandate was a tax increase.  Anything that you have to pay if you don’t pay something else in, at its core, a tax.

Of course Democrats in Congress never wanted to call it that because it never would have passed.  Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the law as constitutional it will be one of the largest tax increases in American history.

But that’s why we have a democracy: the branches of government that balance each other out.

Most of us are better served in watching our own finances that worrying about the Supreme Court. Here are some articles to help you do that:

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