Coase would agree

 Libor is the inter bank lending rate, but it is self computed by the landing banks, in aggregate.  Ripe for rigging?  Sure, but the rigging was a traded variable, it was priced, because each party engaged in rigging with a similar smooth measuring tool. A tool that can estimate the total amount of price rigging. Hence, we get Pit.boss = Coase.  The pit boss is a price fixer, but all the Bid/Ask singletons are prepared after fair scanning of the order book.


Matt Levine on the Libor 'fix'. 

One contrarian thing that I sometimes think about the big Libor scandal is that you can analyze it as a weird market. Some traders at some banks had interest-rate swaps that would profit if Libor was higher, so they pressured their Libor submitters to make up a higher Libor. Other traders at other banks had the other sides of those swaps, so they pressured their submitters to make up a lower Libor. The Libor rate that was ultimately set represented sort of a phantom clearing price for interest-rate derivatives; it may not have been a fair representation of banks' borrowing costs, but it was an imperfect approximate result of market forces.