One Man's View of the World

by Lee Kuan Yew

That is not to say that the government has no role to play whatsoever. From time to time, human greed gets the better of corporate bosses, prompting them to skew the system in their favour. The challenge for governments is in identifying instances of that happening and taking decisive action against it. Its role is to level the playing field as much as possible so that free competition is also fair competition. The scandal surrounding the fixing of the London Interbank Offered Rate, better known as Libor, is one relatively recent example. It involved attempts by banks to manipulate interest rates, compromising the integrity of the banking system to the detriment of other market participants. The chairman and chief executive of Barclays Bank were forced to resign, and the bank was fined hundreds of millions of dollars in America and Britain. This case demonstrates clearly that governments and regulatory authorities cannot afford to let their guard down or to assume that corporate executives will behave ethically when nobody is looking and when huge profits are at stake.