Bank of England: Libor System

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I am very glad that the noble Lord’s health is supporting him through this debate. He is absolutely right to draw our attention to the importance of a liquid and well-functioning interbank lending market.

My understanding—and I will leave it to the Minister to make sure that we are properly informed and updated—is that Libor is no longer a valid benchmark, not only in the UK but now in the United States; that even the period in which synthetic Libor existed has now come to a close; and that the translation of outstanding contracts which had embedded in them the Libor benchmark to the new benchmarks has been overwhelmingly successful. I think we were all afraid that there might be some orphans left out there, where you could not contact one party or the other and therefore it was very difficult to make the legal changes necessary for the contracts to remain in place but attached to new benchmarks. My understanding is that that process has gone very well; I am sure the Minister will update us. Of course, in the UK now we have all migrated to the sterling overnight index average, known as SONIA.

That has been a successful process, but I want to pick up another point to which the noble Lord, Lord James, was directing us. I am not going to describe the mechanisms for Libor because everybody in this Room understands how that process worked. There was a panel of banks which submitted every day to the British Bankers’ Association their assessment of what it would cost them to borrow from other banks, in five major currencies and over lending periods of different durations. What concerned me, and I think many of us, was that that system, which relied on trust and was not transparent, was corrupted. For at least 10 years, the major players on those panels adapted their submissions to the British Bankers’ Association to suit their own target profitability, the bonuses of the traders who were informing the submissions to the benchmark and, frankly, the bonuses of senior management.

Not only was this extensive practice but it was completely open. When I was on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, we heard from quite a number of people about how, on the trading floors, a trader would shout quite openly, “I need a Libor submission set at this level because it will let me close this deal” or “so I get across my bonus benchmark”, or, “We need to do it as a favour to so-and-so at bank X”, or whatever else.

It was standard that Libor was a manipulated number and not a genuine estimate of what it would cost one bank to borrow from another, to the extent that in 2007 and 2008, when we had the financial crisis, the Bank of England, not for any purposes of self-reward but to try to stabilise the economy, contacted the chief executives of the major panel players as they made their Libor submissions and asked them to lowball the number to try to minimise panic in the market. This corruption and manipulation of the process was exposed by American journalists, who passed information to the US supervisors, who turned around and put pressure on the regulators in the UK, which led finally to an FCA report and essentially to the public acknowledgement that this system had completely failed to operate with integrity, probably for a period of at least 10 years.

I have a question for the Minister. We never bottomed out how great the impact of that manipulation was. To give noble Lords an idea of why I am concerned about that number, I have done a back-of-an-envelope calculation. According to figures provided to us by the Library, outstanding loans where the interest rate was based on Libor on any one day approximated $400 trillion. That is the daily outstanding block of loans for which Libor established the interest rate. That would have been a combination of variable-rate loans, which would have been Libor plus a spread, depending on the risk of the borrower—Libor plus 10 basis points, or perhaps 125 basis points for a riskier company—but also fixed-rate loans, because they were a Libor loan with a derivative with an interest rate swap sitting on top. Even fixed-rate loans attached themselves to the number established as the Libor benchmark.

If every day for a year—banks work in 360-day years—Libor manipulation increased the cost of borrowing by one basis point, the collective cost to borrowers would have been an overpricing of $40 billion on any one day. If that is extrapolated to every day for 10 years, we are talking about $144 trillion. This is without question the largest financial scandal ever. If one looks at those funds as being stolen, because the loans were deliberately improperly priced, we are talking about a scandal well in excess of all financial corruption of all kinds over the same period. We have never bottomed out that number. I wonder whether the Minister has a number that would give us an idea of what the theft from borrowers, which is what it was, amounted to.

The noble Lord, Lord James, is right that when the various regulators and enforcement authorities looked to hold someone accountable, they decided that our laws on fraud did not encompass misinforming or deliberately manipulating a benchmark. Therefore, almost nobody ended up paying any price for having participated in these schemes, nor did they lose the bonuses they had gained on the basis of the artificial profits that resulted from using them. As the noble Lord said, just one or two people ended up as scapegoats, usually for a fairly narrowly based conviction.

The damage done to London was extraordinary. London always relied on its reputation for integrity; “My word is my bond” was meant to be an underlying principle. It underpinned the whole notion of light-touch regulation and the beginning, in a sense, of the loss of our standing in financial services is very much linked to the whole Libor-era scandal. I am glad that Libor is behind us but incredibly sad that it happened this way. I understand that there have also been market changes that make things such as Libor less relevant, because there really was not enough depth in the interbank market to make the system—even if you operated it fairly and truthfully—particularly efficient. The move in our case to SONIA makes a great sense, for example, so I am glad that period is behind us.

However, as we look at legislation coming through Parliament that moves to much greater financial regulation, it is now important that we understand why Libor went so wrong, why regulators did not act and how weakened regulation could encourage a repeat of similar behaviour. When we get to the Financial Services and Markets Bill, I will particularly draw the Minister’s attention to the changes in the rules that are being introduced for black pools, which are basically exactly like the Libor panel clubs and in which people exchange information and carry out transactions. At present, those black pools are transparent because pre-trade transparency is a requirement under the European directives. That is about to be removed in the Financial Services and Markets Bill, which returns us to a construct like a Libor panel—one to be manipulated by major institutions.

I am extremely concerned that the lesson of transparency which the whole Libor scandal underpinned is now, in effect, being discarded as we move towards deregulation. Part of that is because we have never bottomed out the size of the damage done to borrowers, and it is about time that we had that number.