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Bloomberg: Barclays CEO Says Rivals Lowballed Libor and Blames Regulators

July 05, 2012, 07:30 AM
By
Topic: Banking News

Bloomberg reported that Robert Diamond, chief executive officer of Barclays, sought to blame other banks for misleading markets about their ability to borrow and regulators for turning a blind eye.

According to the report, Diamond said he was “disappointed” regulators failed to act on repeated warnings from Barclays that competitors had lowballed their submissions.

The report states that in a hearing of Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee, Diamond said, “This isn’t just Barclays.”  Additionally, the report quotes Diamond saying, “Throughout 2007 and 2008, no institution of the 16 banks reporting three-month dollar Libor was at the higher end more consistently than Barclays. Barclays was getting questions about why it was always high and we were saying, ‘We are high because we were reporting at where we were borrowing money.”’

Diamond’s comments underscore concern that Libor, the benchmark for more than $360 trillion of global securities, has stopped being an accurate reflection of banks’ borrowing costs, according to Bloomberg.

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