Jefferies LLC economists have called the transition away from the scandal-plagued London Interbank Offered Rate "the most important development in the financial markets in the years immediately ahead." And there are developments aplenty.
Without much fanfare, the World Bank this week issued $1 billion of two-year floating-rate notes tied to the U.S. Secured Overnight Financing Rate, or SOFR. It's the second sale of such debt after a $6 billion offering from Fannie Mae on July 26 with tenors of six months, 12 months and 18 months. Suddenly, the Libor alternative is picking up some momentum, with Bloomberg News' Maciej Onoszko reporting that Toronto-Dominion Bank now expects a company or financial institution to tap the market in a matter of months.
There's still a long way to go — more than $150 trillion of securities are benchmarked to U.S. Libor, so these two deals are a comparative drop in the bucket. But given that the rate was just introduced in April, and just two weeks later the Federal Reserve Bank of New York disclosed it had made errors with its settings, the deals can be viewed as a vote of confidence. At the very least, it makes the idea of abandoning Libor by the end of 2021 a little less scary.
For those not typically in the weeds of short-term interest rates, Libor is based on a daily poll of banks, asking them to estimate how much it would cost to borrow from one another without collateral. This made it ripe for manipulation, and, indeed, it was revealed that dozens of firms, including large U.S. and European banks, had colluded to set the benchmark at levels that would benefit them.
In a search for something that wouldn't be manipulated (or, at least, would be vastly tougher to rig), the Alternative Reference Rates Committee, made up of Wall Street banks and regulators, settled on a rate that's calculated based on overnight loans collateralized by U.S. government debt. It focuses on data from actual transactions, taking out the guesswork that allowed banks to game Libor.
