The UK’s plan to reform the world’s most important lending rate will guide a global drive towards more transparent and reliable pricing for everything from home mortgages and gold to heating oil, regulators said yesterday.
The UK proposals are aimed at restoring public confidence in the London interbank offered rate, Libor, in the wake of a manipulation scandal that has snared more than a dozen institutions on three continents. Ordinary investors were outraged by the scale of misconduct revealed when Barclayspaid £290m in penalties and admitted that its staff sought to move the benchmark in order to make money on their trades.
Regulators in the US, Europe and Japan said yesterday that the recommendations from Martin Wheatley, who led the UK review, would provide a model for their own efforts to improve interbank lending rates, along with a host of other indices that are calculated using estimates from market participants rather than actual transactions. Such indices are used to price commodities as diverse as petrol and gold.