Clifford Chance

LIBOR - A brief history

19 October 2018

In July 2017, the Chief Executive of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Andrew Bailey, signalled the beginning of the end for LIBOR as an interest rate benchmark. He said that, in spite of the various reforms introduced from 2012, the underlying market for unsecured wholesale term lending to banks is "no longer sufficiently active" and it is "potentially unsustainable, [and] also undesirable, for market participants to rely indefinitely on reference rates that do not have actual underlying markets to support them." So, how did we get to this point?

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