Sunday 15 July 2012

Some LIBOR news via a time machine. Broken links, legal mysteries, a bit of hacking & a result :-)

When I heard first the recent news about LIBOR manipulation I was reminded of an article I had read and posted on Spaces back in 2007. So, I thought I'd go look up the link and re-read it. Microsoft closed Spaces a while ago, but in their wisdom had migrated the accounts over to Wordpress.


Here's my original (migrated) Spaces post. If you click on the link you end up at the main Telegraph page, as the story does not still exist at the original URL.


I emailed the folks at the Telegraph and got this reply, "Thank you for contacting The Telegraph... the article dated 26th August 2007 has been removed for legal reasons". Well that only intrigued me more and so I wrote back asking what the legal reasons were. This was a dead end though as "we are unable to provide any further information regarding your enquiry" was the answer.


Luckily, I  remembered the Internet Archive Wayback Machine & had a try with the URL on there, but that didn't work at first, so I had to hack the URL a bit until, via trial & error, I found this. Unfortunately the second & third page are not accessible there, but now I knew the actual title I tried another search & found this in the Telegraph's own archives :-)


Reading the full article in retrospect is quite eerie, as it says "..the orders from the TOP are that even lending to other banks should be curtailed". Hmm, indeed...


PS if anyone can guess why it might have been removed "for legal reasons" I'd be glad to hear.