The Libor Scandal Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The Libor Scandal - Essay Example The agent then gets rid of the lowest and highest 25 percent of those submissions and the rest are averaged to determine how much the Libor will be. Libor can be said to be very critical as a global benchmark for the short-term interest rates as it is calculated for different maturities and different currencies (Hall 2013). Libor has an effect on global borrowing since here are so many banks worldwide that use it as a base rate to set interest rates towards their customers and the corporate loans. There are hundreds of dollars in trillions in form of loans and securities that have a link to labor. The securities and loans are inclusive of home loans and auto loans. If labor rises then the rates and payments made on loans also increase and when labor falls, they fall. In addition, labor is used for a range of retail products like mortgages and loans given in collages. Labor is also used as the means of settling interest rates contracts in the major world exchanges (Varriale 2012). There is a potentiality that traders manipulated Libor. Financial institutions including Barclays have been under investigations for being suspected of manipulating labor rate. The financial institutions being suspected are inclusive of those in the UK, United States, Japan, and Canada. The first time that Barclays was suspected for manipulating Libor was in 2005. The aim of manipulation of labor was to ensure that the traders of the bank make high profits that are boosted by the base rate, which is the labor rate. During that time, the traders were able to ask the Barclays employees to give figures that in turn would benefit traders and not the rates that bank would pay in order to borrow money. However, there were traders who were able to coordinate with other banks to change the rate too. In this period, Libor maneuvered downward and upward based on the position