The Economist Examines Sandor's Ameribor as Replacement for LIBOR
A Scramble to Replace LIBOR is Under Way
Sitting in his office in the Wrigley Building overlooking the Chicago river in 2012, Richard Sandor, who has spent his career inventing financial products, was reading about the scandals surrounding the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), an array of interest rates set daily by a club of banks in Britain and used to price trillions of dollars’ worth of loans, derivatives and more. “This is stupid,” Mr Sandor recalls saying to a colleague. “Let’s make a bet; LIBOR will lose its pre-eminence.”
Two years later the Federal Reserve reached the same conclusion. It formed a group, the Alternative Rate Reference Committee, which has created a new benchmark dollar interest rate, the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR). Since April, SOFR has been used for a handful of bond offerings by large institutions including the World Bank, MetLife and Fannie Mae. Central banks in Britain, the euro zone, Japan and Switzerland are also constructing new benchmark rates.
Read more at The Economist