The Libor warnings the Bank was told to heed
In 2007, Tucker was into his fifth year as the Bank of England’s executive director for markets. Among his many responsibilities was chairing the Bank’s little-known Sterling Money Markets Liaison Group, or MMLG.
This had been founded eight years earlier as a committee where the Bank could speak to bankers, other regulators and representatives of industry trade bodies to discuss the minutiae of the money markets.
To the banking industry, the money markets are the sort of low-profile, relatively low-grade job that most finance professionals with designs on big bonuses and an early retirement would see as career death. Yet their work is vital to the smooth functioning of the financial system.
This particular November afternoon, a session chaired by Tucker saw several extraordinary claims made, the significance of which is only just becoming apparent.
Paragraph 2.1 of the MMLG’s minutes for the day records: “Several group members thought that Libor [London interbank offer rate] fixings had been lower than actual traded interbank rates through the period of stress.”
To those without a background in money markets, the line would seem innocuous, but to those present it would have been a shocking, almost blasphemous claim. What the bankers were saying was that other lenders had been misrepresenting their bank’s real cost of funding.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9383880/The-Libor-warnings-the-Bank-was-told-to-heed.html
It will be interesting to see whether Baroness Shriti Vadera can deny involvement by the Gordon Brown government.
