Libor Cartels and Hedge-Fund Failures

Libor.

It is fairly well established that a bunch of big banks manipulated the London Interbank Offered Rate, and that the dollar numbers attached to Libor manipulation are quite large, so a bunch of investors and plaintiffs' lawyers got together a while back to sue the banks and get some of those dollars. One of their main theories was that the banks' collusion to manipulate Libor was an antitrust conspiracy. But the district court threw out this theory, reasoning that it can't be an antitrust conspiracy for the banks to get together and agree on Libor, because banks getting together to agree on Libor is just Libor. It can't be illegal to do anticompetitive stuff with Libor, because Libor isn't a competitive market; it's "a cooperative endeavor," so the fact that the banks cooperated in setting a false Libor, while it might be bad, can't be an antitrust violation. I am not an antitrust expert but I found this interpretation clever, and fairly convincing.