Matt Levine, the ex-Goldman partner who knows whereof he speaks, writes for Bloomberg:  In London, Tom Hayes’s Libor manipulation trial started yesterday and this isn’t exactly legal advice but probably don’t say stuff like this in recorded interviews with criminal investigators?

“I mean I probably deserve to be sitting here because, you know, I made concerted efforts to influence Libor,” Hayes said in a Feb. 1, 2013, interview.

Or:

“The point is you’re greedy,” Hayes said in a 2013 interview with U.K. investigators that Chawla played for the jury. “You want every little bit of money you can get because” that’s your performance metric, he said.

One of my strong beliefs about financial crime is that the words “greed” and “greedy” have no analytical value. In a fraud case — where the accusation is that someone made money — saying that he wanted to make money is just a superfluous appeal to jurors’ emotions, a way to deny the humanity of the bankster whose fate they’re deciding. “His motive was a simple one: greed,” said the prosecutor, annoyingly. But Hayes agreed, and on tape! Not helpful.