Five ways big banks' Libor scandal affects you

2. As a current or future retiree

Max Whittaker/Reuters/File
Calpers headquarters is seen in Sacramento, Calif., in this 2009 file photo. Calpers, the largest US public pension fund, says it felt the impact from the rate-fixing Libor scandal.

The Libor scandal involves charges that banks rigged interest rates in two ways: 1) to gain more profits for their trading desks and 2) to appear more financially stable, especially during the financial crisis. Both charges would hurt retirees and future retirees relying on pensions for income. If banks kept rates artificially low, pension funds would see the value of their mortgage-backed securities fall and the interest they earned from those securities reduced.

Pension funds are also investigating whether they can sue the banks for their losses.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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