Welcome To The City That Sues Banks

Welcome To The City That Sues Banks
BALTIMORE - DECEMBER 2: A pedestrian passes a liquor store in the Middle East neighborhood, three blocks north of Johns Hopkins University Medical School, December 2, 2003 in East Baltimore, Maryland. According to a local news media report, the city will soon evict about 250 families in the area and transform it into a biotechnology park that will create 8,000 jobs and 2,000 new and renovated houses in ten years as a revitalization program of the area. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
BALTIMORE - DECEMBER 2: A pedestrian passes a liquor store in the Middle East neighborhood, three blocks north of Johns Hopkins University Medical School, December 2, 2003 in East Baltimore, Maryland. According to a local news media report, the city will soon evict about 250 families in the area and transform it into a biotechnology park that will create 8,000 jobs and 2,000 new and renovated houses in ten years as a revitalization program of the area. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

FORTUNE -- It has been a year since Baltimore sued the big banks -- Bank of America (BAC), Barclays (BCS), Citibank (C), HSBC (HBC), J.P. Morgan (JPM), Lloyds (LYG), UBS (UBS), and WestLB -- the first of many lawsuits to claim that those institutions illegally manipulated the London interbank offer rate, or Libor. It was esoteric stuff until recently, when Libor became an international scandal that spilled beyond the business pages. Regulators now allege that for years several banks may have lied about the interest rates they paid to borrow money from one another. The falsely low rates affected just about everyone, since the interest on trillions of dollars in consumer and municipal loans is set against Libor.

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