The most amazing true confession of a derivatives trader, aptly titled Legerdemath, confirms what we know. Banksters pushed their derivatives to make profits for themselves and fooled their customers with some highfalutin' math, three letter mnemonics and outright fraud.

Our clients were non-financial corporations, the Deltas and Verizons of the world, which relied on us for advice and education. Our directive was “to help companies decrease and manage their risks.” Often we did just that. And often we advised clients to execute trades solely because they presented opportunities for us to profit. In either case, whenever possible we used our superior knowledge to manipulate the pricing of the trade in our favor.

The grand prestigious employer? Citigroup. The fictional pricing that anyone with a solid Bachelors in mathematics could figure out? Interest-rate swaps and Treasury-rate locks.

I never heard this arrangement described as a conflict of interest. I learned to think we were simply smarter than the client. For unsophisticated clients, being smarter meant quoting padded rates. For the rest, a bit of “legerdemath” was required. Most brazenly, we taught clients phony math that involved settling Treasury-rate locks by referencing Treasury yields rather than prices.

If a client requested verification of our pricing, we volunteered to fax a time-stamped printout of market data from when the trade was executed. One person talked to the client on the phone while another stood by the computer and repeatedly hit print. The printouts were sorted, and the one showing the most profitable rate for the bank was faxed to the client, regardless of which rate was actually transacted. If a rate for the client’s specific trade was not on the printout, we might create rigged conversion spreadsheets for them to use in conjunction with the printout.

Other sources of profit lay in details that clients thought were merely procedural but in actuality affected pricing as well. Once, a client called after his interest-rate swap was completed and asked to change a method of counting days. Unbeknownst to him, this change should have lowered his rate. I made the requested change but kept his rate the same, allowing us to realize unwarranted profit. This was standard practice. My coworkers knew what I had done, as did the traders, as did the people who booked trades. I even tallied the “restructuring” as an achievement in a letter angling for a higher bonus.

Over a year ago we wrote how CDOs were based on flawed mathematical models and impossible to verify due to their computational complexity.

I must laugh because Verizon is busy labor arbitraging their geeks instead of listening to them. A notorious user of H-1B guest worker Visas and offshore outsourcing, if they had hired a few American geeks in the executive offices instead of firing them, they might have realized how useful they are to tell them they were getting ripped off:

h/t/ ZeroHedge.