N.Y. Fed quiet on Barclays’ admission of rigging Libor

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has said that he sounded the alarm four years ago to regulators about problems with the benchmark interest rate known as Libor.

But Geithner, who was then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, did not communicate in key meetings with top regulators that British bank Barclays had admitted to Fed staffers that it was rigging Libor, according to people familiar with the matter.

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The Washington Post’s Zachary Goldfarb explains what Libor is and why it’s in the news.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke testified Tuesday that he can not assure that a critical global benchmark called the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, is reliable. Libor has come into question after London-based Barclays admitted it schemed to manipulate Libor during the financial crisis.

Instead, regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department worked largely without the Fed’s help to build a case against Barclays. That work has culminated in a massive scandal rocking the banking industry on both sides of the Atlantic.

As Geithner prepares to testify Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill, he returns to a familiar position as a lightning rod for critics on the left and the right who find fault in his work as a banking regulator before he joined the White House and as a bailout architect under President Obama.

He will face a key question from House and Senate members this week: Did he and others at the New York Fed, the country’s most powerful banking regulator, act urgently enough to stop fraud at Barclays and potentially other banks?

Geithner has said the New York Fed did everything in its power.

“We moved quite quickly to try to get the British to address it and make sure that we brought it to the attention of the full complement of U.S. regulatory agencies so that they could take a careful look at it, which they did,” Geithner said Monday night on Charlie Rose’s interview show. “And to their credit, they’ve done a pretty strong enforcement action right now, but there’s more work to do on this.”

Focus on Libor

Documents released by the New York Fed show that the agency chose to focus on structural problems with Libor rather than help to bring corrupt actions at Barclays and other banks to light.

“At no stage did he [Geithner] or anyone else at the New York Fed raise any concerns with the Bank that they had seen any wrongdoing,” Bank of England governor Mervyn King said in testimony before a British parliamentary committee last week.

Geithner was aware there were problems with how Libor was calculated because it relied on self-reporting by the world’s biggest banks. But it’s unclear from the documents whether he knew about numerous phone calls in which Barclays employees admitted to New York Fed staff members that the bank was manipulating Libor.

In a phone call from April 2008, a Barclays employee made such an admission to New York Fed staff member Fabiola Ravazzolo: “So, we know that we’re not posting um, an honest Libor.” Then in October again, in three separate phone calls, Barclays executives told Fed employees that Libor was “unrealistic” and “absolute rubbish.”

Throughout the spring and summer of 2008, in the midst of increasing turmoil in the financial world, the Fed studied what was wrong with Libor.

Two weeks after the April phone call, Geithner held a meeting called “Fixing LIBOR” with senior New York Fed staff members. A few weeks later, in a meeting with U.S. Treasury officials, New York Fed staffers, including Ravazzolo, presented slides saying there are “questions regarding Libor’s accuracy and relevance.”