Linda Lacewell (Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
New York state regulators want insurers and other financial services companies to explain what they'll do if and when a major interest rate benchmark — the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) — goes away.
New York State Financial Superintendent Linda Lacewell has told the companies to send her detailed life-after-Libor plans by Feb. 7.
The same London banks that created Libor could kill the benchmark at the end of 2021.
The death of the Libor benchmark may not have much effect on short-term investments, but it could have a major effect on long-term investments, Lacewell says.
Resources:
- A copy of the New York Libor announcement, and a link to the industry letter, are available here.
- A SOFR comment letter that Carl Wilkerson, an ACLI vice president, sent the Fed in 2017 is available here.
- An ACLI slidedeck giving an analysis of the looming Libor-to-SOFR shift is available here
- An NAIC Capital Markets Bureau Libor presentation slidedeck is available here.
- A report by Oliver Wyman and Davis Polk on the Libor transition is available here.
U.S. health insurers and U.S. property and casualty insurers tend to have relatively modest investment portfolios, and they tend to invest in a mix of short-term and long-term arrangements.
U.S. life insurers write many products that are designed to stay in place for many years, such as long insurance, annuities, long-term disability insurance and long-term care insurance. U.S. life insurers try to support those long-term obligations with long-duration assets, such as mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, and high-grade corporate bonds.
Life insurers also use futures and swaps to manage investment risk, and the performance of many of those derivatives arrangements is linked to Libor.
Libor serves as a key parameter for about $200 trillion in financial contract value in the United States, and about $150 trillion in financial contract value outside the United States.
Officials at the New York State Department of Financial Services said they want to make sure the directors and managers of regulated institutions understand the possible risks associated with the death of Libor.
"Our financial institutions with Libor exposure need to prepare to manage the significant risks associated with its likely cessation, and be ready to transition to alternative reference rates," Lacewell said in the New York department's call for life-after-Libor plans.
The Benchmark
Libor is a rough measure of the rates big banks in London might have to pay to take out unsecured loans from other big London banks for periods of up to a year.
London banks began developing the benchmark in the 1970s.
The British Bankers Association and British financial services regulators developed the current version of Libor in the mid-1980s. The Libor data series officially goes back to Jan. 1, 1986.
A few dozen banks now contribute the rate data behind the Libor benchmark.
But reports that the banks were manipulating the rate data surfaced around the time of the 2007-2009 Great Recession.
The United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority said in 2017 that it would stop requiring banks to furnish Libor data after 2021.
"As a result, Libor is unlikely to continue past the end of 2021," Lacewell writes in the letter to insurers. "Efforts in the US to create reference rate alternatives are under way, as discussed below. Your institution should be carefully following these developments."
The Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have tried to create a Libor alternative by setting up an Alternative Reference Rates Committee. The committee decided to recommend a new Secured Overnight Financial Rate (SOFR) benchmark to replace Libor.
SOFR is based on the interest rates for "repurchase agreements," or short-term secured loans. In a repo arrangement, one part sells a security to another, and agrees to buy the security back later at a predetermined date and price.
The SOFR benchmark includes only "overnight, Treasury-backed repo transactions that take place in the Bank of New York Mellon's triparty repo system or are cleared through one of two Fixed Income Clearing Corp. platforms: (1) the Delivery-Versus-Payment Repo Service and (2) the General Collateral Finance (GCF) Repo Service," according to the federal Office of Financial Research, an arm of the U.S. Treasury Department.
