Debt levels are not an issue

The Bank of England must be clear about its focus on jobs and growth – and that stimulus needn’t spoil anyone’s sleep writes Phillip Inman in The Guardian

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey was sure-footed at the start of the pandemic. Photograph: Reuters 



Tearing at the Tory party’s fabric is the thought of spiralling government debt. The subject triggers a cold sweat in some of the most emotionally resilient Conservative backbench MPs, such is the distress it generates.

Much as the German centre-right parties have spent the past 90 years fearing a return of hyperinflation, their UK counterparts worry about paying the national mortgage bill, and the possibility it will one day engulf and sink the ship of state.

Since the budget, there is a sense that the costs of the pandemic, of levelling up, of going green and of social care – to name just four candidates for extra spending – are scarily high.

Plenty of economists say these costs can be managed with higher borrowing. Even the experts who warned against rising debts back in 2009 have changed their minds. The International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development say that after 30 years of falling interest rates, this is the moment to stick extra spending on a buy now, pay later tab. 

Yet, gnawing away at the Tory soul is the prospect of an increase in interest rates by a fragile Bank of England, an institution that owns more than a third of UK government debt. This week, Threadneedle Street’s monetary policy committee meets to discuss the state of the economy and whether it needs to adjust its current 0.1% base rate.

Last year the committee was concerned that the economic situation was so bad it might need to lower interest rates even further, pushing them into negative territory. In recent weeks, though, the success of the vaccine programme, some additional spending by Rishi Sunak in his spring budget and Joe Biden’s monster stimulus package – which has made its way unscathed through the US Congress – have turned a few heads.

Now there are warnings of a rebound in growth so strong that it will force central banks to calm things down with the much-dreaded increase in interest rates.

At Thursday’s meeting, Andrew Bailey will mark a year as governor, and will be forgiven for wanting to draw breath. Within weeks of the handover from Mark Carney, he was plunged into the pandemic and – like his counterpart in the Treasury, Sunak – forced to plot a way through the crisis.

Bailey should set aside his in-tray and do the nation a favour by making explicit what, in a post-pandemic world, the Bank’s mandate means. And what he should say is neither outlandish nor controversial.

It should not differ wildly from what Jerome Powell, the head of the US central bank, said last week. Bailey should explain that the Bank’s focus is on generating a path for growth that has momentum and is sustainable. Only when the Bank can verify that jobs are being created – and, more importantly, that pay rises of at least 4% a year are being awarded – will it begin to consider tightening monetary policy.

This means interest rates cannot increase until the government has two things working in its favour. First, that there are enough jobs and pay increases to generate the level of tax receipts that can pay for higher debt bills. Second, that there is a level of growth which means the debt-to-GDP ratio, expected to hit about 110% during this parliament, starts coming down, even as the government spends more.

If Bailey says this like he means it, those who worry about rising interest rates can switch to worrying about something else, such as the climate emergency, Britain’s spectacular loss of biodiversity and rising levels of child poverty.

Bailey’s record over his first year in charge does not augur well. While he was sure-footed at the outset of the pandemic, dusting off the 2008 crisis playbook and printing a huge sum of money to restore confidence, things soon started to go awry.

He has flip-flopped from optimist to pessimist on the economy while throwing incendiary devices on the fears of those who worry about debt. In an interview last June, for example, he claimed the bond markets brought Britain close to insolvency when the bank launched its first pandemic rescue operation. It was an exaggeration that matched the hyperbole of his recent support for the idea that consumers are ready to “binge” once lockdown eases.

If the past 10 years has taught us anything, it is that the Bank has consistently done too little to help the economy and not too much. Bailey could ask Sunak to overhaul the MPC remit, increasing the inflation target from the current 2% to 3% or 4%, or bolting on a growth target that would force the Bank to keep rates where they are until growth reaches 3% or 3.5% a year.

That could be Bailey’s legacy, for which the nation would thank him.

Economics for Non Economists 2 – Quantitative Easing Explained

by Girish Menon

Pradhip, you have asked for an ‘Idiot’s guide on Quantitative Easing and how it affects the economy’. Let me try:

The Bank of England (BOE) has been practising Quantitative Easing (QE) since 2009. The amounts are:

Time	Amount in £ Billions
Nov. 2009	200
July 2012	375
Aug. 2016	435
Mar. 2020	645
June 2020	745

Ref – The Bank of England

What exactly did the BOE do when they said they were doing QE?

The BOE created additional digital money and used it to buy financial assets (especially government bonds) which were owned by the privately owned banks, pension funds and others.

How did they create this additional money?

Unlike you or me who would be arrested if we did this; the BOE has been conferred with monopoly powers to conjure up any amount of money from thin air by typing the necessary numbers into its bank accounts. It’s as simple as saying, ‘Let there be £745 billion and it appears in the bank’s accounts.

Why do they do QE?

Post the 2008 financial crisis there was a liquidity crisis (see below for explanation of liquidity crisis). The BOE by buying the government bonds from local banks transferred cash to them thus enabling them to start their lending activities in the economy.

In 2020 too they have done the same, but this time I suspect that even if the commercial banks are willing to lend there may not be enough borrowers and so this policy may not have the intended effect of stimulating economic growth.

How does QE affect the economy?

The dominant worldview is that debt drives the world. So QE ensures that lenders have enough money to lend to prospective borrowers. Borrowers borrow money to produce and sell goods at a profit; enabling them to repay their loans with interest while creating jobs in the economy.

The above borrower will use his loan to buy machinery, employ labour…. One man’s spending is another man’s income, so the money begins to circulate among citizens in an economy and a positive spiral will push economic growth and create employment.

However, all this theory hinges on the citizens’ confidence about the future. In the current Covid climate, with firms downsizing at will and people worried about their future, I doubt if there will be a critical mass of borrowers to re-start the stalled economic activity.

Pradhip, thus the BOE does indeed have a magic wand to create money out of thin air. You may ask why is it that in a free market I am not allowed to create my own money? Now that question will be considered seditious!

----

 

What Is a Liquidity Crisis?

A liquidity crisis is a financial situation characterized by a lack of cash or easily-convertible-to-cash assets on hand across many businesses or financial institutions simultaneously. In a liquidity crisis, liquidity problems at individual institutions lead to an acute increase in demand and decrease in supply of liquidity, and the resulting lack of available liquidity can lead to widespread defaults and even bankruptcies. (Ref Investopedia)

---Also watch

Britain and Covid-19

by Giffenman

This is an unusual time for the whole world as it deals with the Corona pandemic. In my opinion when the crisis ends our world will be an entirely different place from what it was in early 2020. Every one’s consciousness would have been affected by coping with the disease and I hope it will result in a different and more egalitarian politics.

The Corona pandemic has laid bare the unpreparedness of the UK government to the crisis. Its much touted public health system, the NHS, has been found short of equipment, manpower and ideas to cope with the disease. The NHS had warned the government in 2016 about its inability to cope in the case of such a breakout but the report was suppressed. This is not surprising since governments since the 1980s have been privatising the NHS by stealth.

Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, did not want the UK to respond like China, Korea or Germany did to Covid-19. He wanted to use Darwinian principles of ‘survival of the fittest’ and get Britons to develop herd immunity. It could be that he was aware that the NHS was in no position to cope with the pandemic and did not want the facts exposed. His ultimate ignominy was that he was afflicted by Corona and has spent the last few nights in a NHS hospital.

The biggest surprise in this period has been the behaviour of the chancellor Rishi Sunak. He has, in the past few days, made unlimited funds available for the nation to cope with the health and economic impact of the pandemic. This is in sharp contrast to the austerity agenda in vogue since 2010. Sunak’s popularity has shot up among the public and he is being touted as a replacement for the currently invalid Prime Minister.

Even more surprising is the behaviour of the czars of the independent Bank of England (BOE). In synchronised operations with Rishi Sunak they slashed interest rates to 0.1% and agreed to borrow large amounts to kick-start the economy. Then a couple of days ago, they even abandoned their orthodox ideology on borrowings via gilts and decided to create money out of thin air to help the government deal with the crisis. The BOE even surprised itself when it stopped commercial banks from paying dividends to their shareholders.

If the financial and economic arm of the government is taking such unorthodox and knee-jerk measures in a concerted manner one does not need much imagination to imagine what might be their prognoses for the UK economy in the immediate future.

Move over central bankers, your models are part of the problem

The new masters of the universe are struggling to understand what makes a modern economy tick and their actions could prove harmful.

Chris Giles in The Financial Times

Central bankers usurped the titans of Wall Street as the masters of the universe almost a decade ago. They rescued the global economy from the financial crisis, flooding the world with cheap money. They used their powers effectively to get banks lending again. Their actions raised asset prices, keeping business and consumer confidence up. Financial markets and populations hang on their words. But never have they been so vulnerable. 

As they gather in Washington for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund, there is a crisis of confidence in central banking. Their economic models are failing and there are doubts whether they understand the effects of interest rates and other monetary policies on the economy. 

In short, the new masters of the universe might not understand what makes a modern economy tick and their well-intentioned actions could prove harmful. 

While there have long been critics of the power of central bankers on the left and the right, such profound doubts have never been so present within their narrow world. In the words of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, they risk being the next ones to be found swimming naked when the tide goes out. 

The ability of central banks to resolve these questions does not just affect growth rates, but is fundamental to the health of the democracies of advanced economies, many of which have been assailed by populist uprisings. 

“If we can’t get inflation back up [trouble lies ahead]. We can’t have political stability without wage growth,” says Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute and formerly a central banker at the Bank of England. 

The root of the current insecurity around monetary policy is that in advanced economies — from Japan to the US — inflation is not behaving in the way economic models predicted. 

Deflation failed to materialise in the depths of the great recession of 2008-09 and now that the global economy is enjoying its broadest and strongest upswing since 2010, inflationary pressures are largely absent. Even as the unemployment rate across advanced economies has fallen from almost 9 per cent in 2009 to less than 6 per cent today, IMF figures this week show wage growth has been stuck hovering around annual increases of 2 per cent. The normal relationships in the labour market have broken down. 

Amid this forecasting nightmare, some frank talk is breaking out. Janet Yellen, chair of the US Federal Reserve and the world’s most important central banker, has been the most direct. “Our framework for understanding inflation dynamics could be mis-specified in some fundamental way,” she said last month. Her sentiments are spreading. 

For Mark Carney, governor of the BoE, global considerations “have made it more difficult for central banks to set policy in order to achieve their objectives”. Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, is keeping the faith for now, but observes, “the ongoing economic expansion . . . has yet to translate sufficiently into stronger inflation dynamics”. 

Claudio Borio, chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements, which provides banking services to the world’s central banks, says: “If one is completely honest, it is hard to avoid the question: how much do we really know about the inflation process?” 

The details of macroeconomic models are fiendishly complicated, but at their heart is a relationship — called the Phillips curve — between the economic cycle and inflation. The cycle can be measured by unemployment, the rate of growth or other variables, and the model predicts that if the economy is running hot — if unemployment falls below a long-run sustainable level or if growth is persistently faster than its speed limit — inflation will rise. 

The models are augmented by a concept of inflation expectations, which keep inflation closer to a central bank’s target — usually 2 per cent — if the public trusts that central bankers will do whatever it takes to return inflation to that level after any temporary deviation. The holy grail for central bankers is to claim credibly that they have “anchored inflation expectations” at the target level. 

In the model, the most important factors that explain price movements are therefore the degree to which the economy has room to grow without inflation, termed “slack” or “the output gap”, and the public’s inflation expectations. 

The role of central banks in the model is to set the short-term interest rate. If a central bank sets its official interest rates low, people and companies will be encouraged to borrow more to spend and invest and discouraged from saving, boosting the economy in the short term. Higher interest rates cool demand. 

The first fundamental problem with the model is, as Mr Borio says, “the link between measures of domestic slack and inflation has proved rather weak and elusive for at least a couple of decades”. 

While Japan’s unemployment rate is now back down to the levels of the 1970s and 1980s boom, leaving little slack, inflation is barely above zero. In Britain, unemployment has almost halved since 2010, but wage growth has stuck resolutely at 2 per cent a year. 

But many economists and central bankers are wedded to the underlying theory, which is about 30 years old, and seek to tweak it to explain recent events rather than ditch it in favour of less orthodox ideas. Such nips and tucks are occurring all over the world, although the explanations differ. 

Ms Yellen has highlighted measurement issues in inflation and “idiosyncratic shifts in the prices of some items, such as the large decline in telecommunication service prices seen earlier in the year”. Similarly, the ECB is fond of a new definition — “super core inflation”, which strips out more items from the index and shows the bank performing better against its target than the headline measure. But few central bankers are happy with meeting targets only once they have moved the goalposts. 

A second explanation is that the level of unemployment that is consistent with stable inflation has fallen. In 2013, the BoE thought the UK economy could not withstand unemployment falling below 7 per cent before wages and inflation would pick up. It now thinks that rate is 4.5 per cent. On this reasoning, inflation has been low because there was more slack in the economy than they had thought. 

The problem with such explanations, as Daniel Tarullo, a Fed governor for eight years until April, notes, is that if central bankers keep changing their notion of sustainable unemployment levels “sound estimation and judgment are sometimes hard to differentiate from guesswork in attempting to see through transitory developments”. 

A third explanation is that central bankers have been so successful in anchoring inflation expectations, companies do not seek to raise prices any faster and workers do not ask for wage rises even when jobs are plentiful. 

Mr Draghi recently urged union pay bargainers to stop looking backward at inflation rates of the past when they negotiate wages, in a move that used to be unthinkable for a central banker. The problem with this explanation is both the self-serving reasoning and the fact that inflation expectations cannot be measured. 

“Over my time at the Fed, I came to worry that inflation expectations are bearing an awful lot of weight in monetary policy these days, considering the range and depth of unanswered questions about them,” says Mr Tarullo. 

The Bank of Japan, meanwhile, frets that companies are cutting employees’ hours and raising productivity rather than paying more, which is hampering its ability to push up inflation despite extremely low unemployment. 

If it was not bad enough that the link between the economic cycle and inflation has broken down, the second fundamental problem in central banking is that estimates of the neutral rate of interest — seen as the long-term rate of interest that balances people’s desire to save and invest with their desire to borrow and spend — appear to have fallen persistently across the world. 

The Fed’s central estimates of the real neutral interest rate has declined by nearly two-thirds in five years, from 2 per cent to 0.75 per cent. But the figures are again little more than guesswork. As Ms Yellen said, “[the neutral rate’s] value at any point in time cannot be estimated or projected with much precision”. 

Whether it is because ageing populations want to save more or because of a global “savings glut”, as former Fed chair Ben Bernanke said, low rates no longer have the same impact, limiting the effectiveness of the medicine central banks want to administer. 

Regardless of the terminology, the two problems combined suggest central bankers cannot easily determine whether their economies need stimulus or cooling and do not know whether their monetary tools are helping them do their job. And there is increasing concern, even expressed by Ms Yellen, that the underlying theoretical model might simply be rotten to the core and attempts to tweak it are futile. 

“Essentially you are setting policy on things you don’t know and can’t measure and then reasoning after the fact,” says Mr Tarullo. His core argument is that central banks maintain an absolute faith in the model with absolutely no evidence to support it. 

At a conference last month to celebrate the BoE’s 20 years of independence, Christina Romer, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, urged central bankers to have a more open mind. 

New research is needed to question whether current thinking is deficient, she said, “and if such research suggests our ideas explaining how the economy works are wrong or need to change, then central bankers need to embrace those ideas”. 

The most aggressive critic of the consensus is Mr Borio of the BIS. He accuses central bankers of misunderstanding the drivers of inflation and their effects on the economy. His argument is that global forces of trade integration and technology are more convincing than concepts of domestic slack in explaining the absence of pricing power among companies and employees. 

He asks: “Is it reasonable to believe that the inflation process should have remained immune to the entry into the global economy of the former Soviet bloc and China and to the opening up of other emerging market economies?” 

His concern is that by keeping interest rates low, central bankers have no effect on inflation or the economy other than to increase the level of debt. The result is that it will be harder “to raise interest rates without causing economic damage, owing to the large debts and distortions in the real economy that the financial cycle creates”. 

It is not a popular view, but it is no longer dismissed out of hand. Ms Yellen justified her stance on continuing to raise interest rates gradually in the face of persistently low inflation by appealing to concerns about debt. 

“Persistently easy monetary policy might also eventually lead to increased leverage and other developments, with adverse implications for financial stability,” she said. 

With central bankers credited for keeping the economic show on the road over the past decade, it will come as a shock to many to hear how little confidence they have in their models, their policies and their tools. 

One question posed by Richard Barwell, a senior economist at BNP Paribas, is whether they should let on about how little they know. “It’s rather like Daddy is driving the car down a hill, turning round to the family and saying, ‘I’m not sure the brakes work, but trust me anyway’,” he says. 

For now, the public still trust the women and men who work in the marbled halls of central banks around the world. But that confidence is fragile. Central bankers might have been the masters of the universe of the past decade, but they know well what happened to the previous holders of that title.

No one really understands what’s going on in our economy

Does anyone properly understand what’s happening in the UK economy anymore? (Editor's comment: If you don't understand then why are you still in your job?)

Can it really be true that an economy which has created more than a million private sector jobs over the past two and a half years is showing no growth at all?  Photo: Reuters

By Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph

7:44PM GMT 11 Feb 2013

I’m sure I don’t, though I spend longer than most attempting to read the tea leaves, and I’m ever more convinced the policy makers don’t either.

There are two related problems here. One is with the data, which are ever more contradictory. Some of them point to a flatlining, or even still declining, economy, with badly impaired levels of productivity, but there are also quite a lot of alternative data to suggest something better – most notably in near record levels of private sector job creation. The other problem is with what fiscal and monetary policy are trying to achieve, which seems to grow more confused by the day.

Both intellectually and practically, monetary policy has become something of a mess. Before the crisis, the Bank of England was guided by a simple and absolute inflation target, which it was relatively successful at meeting and was easy to understand. But since the credit crunch, it has taken on another purpose – that of bringing about a return to sustainable growth. This has brought the Bank into conflict with its primary objective. Since the crisis began, inflation has consistently been well above target, but for a brief dip in 2009, and it has twice been above 5pc.

This week’s quarterly inflation report will bring further discomfort, with the Bank forced to concede both that growth is failing to respond as hoped and that inflation is now likely to remain elevated for the next two years.

Unfortunately, there appears to have been no trade-off between inflation and growth. Inflation has stayed high but growth has been non-existent. The Bank excuses its evident failure on inflation by stressing the apparently higher purpose of preventing a collapse in output, and with justification, it further insists that domestically generated wage inflation has remained tame. This is all very well but, with wages lagging prices by some distance, disposable incomes have been quite severely squeezed and this is plainly bad for domestic demand and growth.

With the Bank’s admission that inflation may remain above target for the next two years, the squeeze on disposable incomes is likely to persist. So, in this regard, the Bank’s policy of tolerating elevated inflation in pursuit of higher growth has been quite harmful to both objectives.

Sticking to the inflation remit has become something of a charade but, ridiculously, the Bank still pretends that this is what it is trying to do. It is to be hoped that the new Governor, Mark Carney, can bring more clarity and openness to the Bank’s endeavours. Don’t expect miracles.

Fiscal policy has been equally badly wrong-footed. Lack of growth has derailed the Government’s deficit reduction plan, threatening certain fiscal crisis down the line in the absence of evasive action.
What’s more, the unwritten compact between Government and Bank of England, under which the Bank is supposed to compensate for tight fiscal policy with monetary activism, seems to be breaking down. At last week’s meeting, the Monetary Policy Committee decided to do nothing even though it judges risks still to be on the downside. To the chagrin of George Osborne, the Chancellor, Sir Mervyn seems to be saying there is little more that monetary policy can throw at the problem.
Mind you, the data as they stand would be enough to paralyse even the most sure-footed of policymakers into inaction. Can it really be true that an economy which has created more than a million private sector jobs over the past two and a half years is showing no growth at all?

Equally hard to understand is why the UK’s export performance continues to look so lamentable. The eurozone crisis provides only part of the explanation, since even Spain and Greece have done better on exports than Britain, and that’s without the “benefit” of a sharp devaluation in the currency.
Britain’s exceptionally large services sector, and its fast-growing digital economy, may provide partial answers to all these puzzles. Once you strip out disruptions to, and structural decline in, North Sea oil revenues, then there has been some underlying GDP growth.

Moreover, if you think of much of the growth that took place in the pre-crisis bubble years as essentially just the “candyfloss” of an out of control financial and property sector, then today’s stagnation looks much easier to understand. Service industries in general, and financial services in particular, are notoriously difficult to measure, both in terms of their output and contribution to exports.

Part of Britain’s problem with the European Union is that there is still no properly functioning internal market across key service sectors. The EU exploits the UK’s weaknesses in traded goods while denying it the opportunity to play to its strengths in services. Until these deficiencies are rectified, the EU will struggle to be a net positive to the UK economy.

But that’s by the by. Looking at business investment, it was on a declining trend from long before the crisis and, to the extent that it was happening at all, there was a disproportionate emphasis on commercial property, great swathes of which now lie empty. Bulldozing this unwanted surplus would perhaps be the best solution, or at least converting it into housing.

So there’s another big chunk of past growth that has turned out to be of little or no long-term value. Strip these things out and it is by no means clear that the rest of the economy is suffering the crippling decline in productivity widely assumed. To the contrary, much of the anecdotal evidence points to significant advances, especially in the digital economy, which is growing faster in Britain than almost anywhere else.

According to a report by the Boston Consulting Group, the UK is now home to the largest per capita ecommerce market and the second largest online advertising market anywhere in the world.

Much of the growth in these markets, the productivity gains they drive, and the intangible benefits they deliver, are not caught by official GDP figures, which only attempt to measure the market value of the economy. In a paper just published, Jonathan Haskel of Imperial College Business School and others find that measured real value added has been understated by 1.1pc since the end of 2010 because of failure to capture intangible investment. Take this into account and there has in fact been no fall in productivity since then.

These musings lead to three conclusions. First and foremost, the Chancellor needs to act swiftly to recalibrate fiscal consolidation so as to give growth a supply-side, tax-cutting shot in the arm. Second, he should answer calls from both Sir Mervyn King and Mark Carney for a review of the Bank’s monetary remit. Finally, something has to be done about the GDP data, which beyond their capacity for political knock-about, have become about as useful as a chocolate teapot. (Editor's comments - The analysis is fine but the problem is with the conclusions - This maybe a ruse to cut taxes for the rich! Secondly the author now admits the problems with using GDP data as an apt indicator of economic performance - wheras all this while the UK and the USA have been telling the whole world that GDP performance is the best measure of economic performance. Alas! - the naysayers were saying it all along!)

The UK Banking Fraud

Libor scandal: gunfight on Threadneedle Street

This is not just some common or garden mishap or even misbehaviour at a big business. This is 'fraud'

• Editorial
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 July 2012 20.50 BST

Only two weeks into the market-rigging scandal and already the economic-policy establishment resembles the final scene of Reservoir Dogs: a bunch of men in suits all blindly shooting at each other.

Former Barclays boss Bob Diamond has landed the Bank of England's Paul Tucker in deep trouble, with a note implying that he encouraged the misreporting of money-market rates. Barclays' ex-chief operating officer Jerry del Missier told MPs this week that Mr Diamond ordered him to fiddle Libor rates. And Barclays was accused by theFinancial Services Authority (FSA) on Monday of a "culture of gaming – and gaming us". The FSA has been dumped in it by Mervyn King, who argued on Tuesday that it was not the Bank's job to regulate Libor – the implication being that it was the FSA's fault. Both the FSA and the Bank agree that prime responsibility for monitoring Libor lay with the British Bankers' Association. And then there is George Osborne, whose main contribution to the chaos has been to suggest to a magazine interviewer that Gordon Brown and his lieutenants are somehow to blame.

This is the British economic-policy establishment under unprecedented pressure – and what an unseemly, blame-ducking, buck-passing panic it presents. Not just the humbling of some of our most senior and respected officials but also the erraticism with which they have been making policy. Take, for instance, the ousting of Bob Diamond. The FSA's Adair Turner told MPs this week that when he spoke to the Barclays chairman Marcus Agius after the Libor scandal, he had expected Mr Diamond to walk the plank. Something was obviously lost in translation, however, because Mr Agius stood down instead. It took the intercession of Mervyn King to force out the Barclays chief executive. And why exactly was Mr Diamond pushed out? Not for any direct involvement in the Libor scandal but, in the words of Mr King yesterday: "They [the bank] have been sailing too close to the wind across a wide number of areas." No actual infraction; just a general sense of having gone too far for too long. This raises the question of why no regulator seriously intervened in Barclays before the Libor scandal. Bob Diamond has been head of one of Britain's biggest banks since January 2011, yet no official has brought up a previous incident where they told the board to change their behaviour or their personnel. The impression left is of rather rough justice. As Andrew Tyrie, head of the Treasury select committee, drily observed in the same session, by that measure every chief executive in the land is "only a couple of bad dinners" away from being forced out of a post.

This is not just some common or garden mishap or even misbehaviour at a big business. As Mr King observed on Tuesday, this is "fraud". And it has not just been carried out by Barclays, but by a string of other financial institutions – who between them fiddled the benchmark interest rates that are used as reference for hundreds of billions of pounds' worth of transactions. Some of the commentary about this scandal has brought up the fact that this occurred during the credit crunch in 2008, when it would apparently have been in everyone's interests to pretend that all was normal in money markets. Maybe, except that this scamming took place over at least four years – and the kindest interpretation of the evidence to date is that officials asked barely any questions. In place of supervision there was what looks like worrying chumminess. "Well done, man. I am really, really proud of you," Mr Diamond emailed the number two at the Bank on his promotion in December 2008. Mr Tucker replied: "You've been an absolute brick."

This story has so far revolved around one bank rigging one set of interest rates, involving emails and letters and committee hearings. Imagine what a serious, wide-ranging inquiry could uncover. Britain certainly needs one, because this blossoming scandal threatens not just the reputation of an industry but the regulators and ministers who let it run riot.

Regulatory Capture - The Bank of England knew of LIBOR rigging but did nothing

Ben Chu in The Independent

Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic failed to act on clear warnings that the Libor interest rate was being falsely reported by banks during the financial crisis, it emerged last night. 

A cache of documents released yesterday by the New York Federal Reserve showed that US officials had evidence from April 2008 that Barclays was knowingly posting false reports about the rate at which it could borrow in order to assuage market concerns about its solvency.

An unnamed Barclays employee told a New York Fed analyst, Fabiola Ravazzolo, on 11 April 2008: "So we know that we're not posting, um, an honest Libor." He said Barclays started under-reporting Libor because graphs showing the relatively high rates at which the bank had to borrow attracted "unwanted attention" and the "share price went down".

The verbatim note of the call released by the Fed represents the starkest evidence yet that Libor-fiddling was discussed in high regulatory circles years before Barclays' recent £290m fine.

The New York Fed said that, immediately after the call, Ms Ravazzolo informed her superiors of the information, who then passed on her concerns to Tim Geithner, who was head of the New York Fed at the time. Mr Geithner investigated and drew up a six-point proposal for ensuring the integrity of Libor which he presented to the British Bankers Association, which is responsible for producing the Libor rate daily.

Mr Geithner, who is now US Treasury Secretary, also forwarded the six-point plan to the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King. The Bank pointed out last night that there was no evidence in the Geithner letter of banks actually making false submissions – although then note did allude to "incentives to misreport".

It was unclear last night whether Mr Geithner informed Sir Mervyn about the testimony of the Barclays employee who said that the bank was being dishonest in its submissions.

If it turned out that he did, that would be highly damaging for the Bank since it has always claimed that it never saw or heard any evidence that private banks were deliberately making false reports about their borrowing costs. Sir Mervyn is due to be questioned by the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee next Tuesday, where MPs are likely to put this question to the Governor.

The Bank's Deputy Governor, Paul Tucker, went before the Treasury committee last week to answer allegations that he had put pressure on Barclays to misreport its borrowing rates in 2008 while attempting to promote financial stability. Mr Tucker denied that he had done so and said he only found out that Barclays had been deliberately submitting dishonest Libor submissions recently.

The New York Fed released its cache of documents in response to a request from the chairman of Congress's Committee on Financial Services on Oversight and Investigation, Randy Neugebauer, who has been investigating how much US regulators knew about the rate-fixing scandal, in which 11 other banks around the world have been implicated.

A separate email released by the Bank of England yesterday shows that Mr Tucker forwarded the Geithner email to Angela Knight, the former chief executive of the British Bankers Association. She responded saying that "changes had been made to incorporate the views of the Fed".

While the BBA is understood to have acted on two of Mr Geithner's proposals, the other four were not adopted.

Before hearing from Sir Mervyn on Tuesday, the Treasury Select Committee is set to take evidence on Monday afternoon from Jerry del Missier, the former chief operating officer at Barclays, who gave the green light for traders to submit false Libor submissions during the crisis. He will be asked about whether he thought the order to do so had come down from the Bank of England.

Last month Barclays was fined £290m for rigging Libor between 2005 and 2008. The regulators found that Barclays traders had initially submitted false reports to make profits for its traders, but subsequently to allay concerns about the bank's health. Barclays' chief executive Bob Diamond resigned on 3 July. The Libor rate is used to fix the cost of borrowing on mortgages, loans and derivatives worth more than $450 trillion (£288 trillion) globally.

The missed warnings: ‘So we know that we’re not posting, um an honest Libor

One document released yesterday by the Fed detailed a conversation between staffer Fabiola Ravazzolo and an unnamed Barclays employee in April 2008, including the following edited extract:

Fabiola Ravazzolo: And, and why do you think that there is this, this discrepancy? Is it because banks maybe they are not reporting what they should or is it um…

Barclays employee: Well, let's, let's put it like this and I'm gonna be really frank and honest with you.

FR: No that's why I am asking you [laughter] you know, yeah [inaudible] [laughter]

BE: You know, you know we, we went through a period where we were putting in where we really thought we would be able to borrow cash in the interbank market and it was above where everyone else was publishing rates.

FR: Mm hmm.

BE: And the next thing we knew, there was um, an article in the Financial Times, charting our LIBOR contributions... and inferring that this meant that we had a problem... and um, our share price went down... So it's never supposed to be the prerogative of a, a money market dealer to affect their company share value.

FR: Okay.

BE: And so we just fit in with the rest of the crowd, if you like... So, we know that we're not posting um, an honest LIBOR. And yet and yet we are doing it, because, um, if we didn't do it it draws, um, unwanted attention on ourselves.

FR: Okay, I got you then.

BE: And at a time when the market is so um, gossipy... it was not a useful thing for us as an organization.

Bank of England says Libor scandal may be going on in other markets too

The market for determining one of the world’s key interest rates was a “cesspit” and banks cannot be trusted to be honest in several other major markets, the deputy governor of the Bank of England has warned.

By James Kirkup, and Angela Monaghan in The Telegraph

7:51PM BST 09 Jul 2012 

Paul Tucker told MPs that Barclays’ abuse of the Libor system may be only one part of the banks’ dishonesty over crucial financial information, suggesting that other markets should now be investigated.

An official inquiry into Libor – which helps determine interest rates for householders and businesses – should be broadened to include several over markets where banks are trusted to report their own data, he said.

Mr Tucker’s evidence to the Treasury Select Committee also reignited the political row over the Libor scandal as he insisted that members of the last Labour government had not “absolutely not” put pressure on him to reduce Libor.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, has said that that the last government was “clearly involved” in the banks’ dishonest under-stating of the interest rates they were paying to borrow on money markets.

Labour last night demanded Mr Osborne withdraw his claims, but Treasury sources insisted that question remain about Labour’s direct dealings with dishonest banks during the 2007-08 financial crisis.

Barclays has been fined almost £300 million for deliberately lying about the rates it was paying during the financial crisis, in order to downplay the financial pressure it was under.

Other banks are also being investigated for distorting Libor, which is calculated on major banks’ own reports of their borrowing costs.

Mr Tucker said he could not be sure that abuse of the Libor system is not continuing to this day, telling the committee: “I can't be confident of anything after learning of this cesspit.”

The Libor scandal could be repeated in a number of other “self-certifying” markets where prices are determined, he said.

“Self-certification is clearly open to abuse, so this could occur elsewhere,” he said.

A Financial Services Authority inquiry into Libor should be extended to other self-certifying markets, he said. The Treasury said last night that the review, led by Martin Wheatley, was free to examine markets other than Libor.

An expansion of the FSA review could take in a number of other interest-rate-related data as well as some complex financial instruments measuring the difference between banks’ borrowing costs and that of the US government. Some markets in gold and oil are also based on self-certification.

Mr Tucker faced intense questions from the MPs about why the Bank had not acted on abuse of Libor earlier and had not apparently been aware of abuses until a few weeks ago.

He admitted that the Bank had been concerned about the integrity of the Libor process during the financial crisis, but did not suspect deliberate wrongdoing. “We thought it was a malfunctioning market, not a dishonest market,” he said.

The Bank had opened the door to changing the way Libor was calculated in 2008, but did not act because of the turmoil in the global financial system, he said.

“We made a judgement that moving away from the existing method of self-certification was just not feasible during a financial crisis”.