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Comment by youngtaff | Hacker News Reader

I think the harsh reality is he was a foot soldier, and the people who encouraged him got away (so far)

You guessed it. Hayes actually submitted as evidence a UBS instruction manual on rigging the rate. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-18/ubs-gave-o...

That's conflating two issues - UBS was setting their own number in their own interest. Hayes was bribing people at other banks to manipulate the rate. Both are bad, but Hayes was in another class of bad.

I disagree. Was Hayes acting solely on his own behalf, or on theirs as well? Were these or other attempts to manipulate Libor sanctioned by UBS? From another article:

"The document [that Hayes points to] instructs Libor submitters to clear their judgements on the rate with certain named traders. Defence lawyer Neil Hawes last week suggested the traders held derivatives positions dependent on Libor."

http://www.risk.net/operational-risk-and-regulation/news/241...

Yeah. I find it hard to believe he just did this via some serendipitous realization. Doesn't pass the sniff test.

Merely executing orders doesn't make a hitman less of a criminal.

Not to mention that (as I understand it), he wasn't even trying to play the Nuremberg defence so much as claiming he'd assumed it was OK because people that could have didn't try to stop him.

well also b/c at the most you have just your job on the line...

I think the idea behind the Nuremberg defense is that you can't refuse orders b/c it's the military and refusing orders can be punishable by death

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