The Federal Reserve Bank of New York today published its final calculation methodology for determining the daily compounded averages of the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, as well as the daily SOFR index that will allow users to calculate average rates over customer time periods.
To help minimize any expected changes in the value of financial contracts that might result from a sudden reference rate shift, the Alternative Reference Rates Committee today sought public feedback on methodologies for calculating spread adjustments on financial products that reference the London Interbank Offered Rate.
The impending demise of Libor is not a liability—it’s an opportunity.
House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) wrote to Federal Reserve Vice Chairman for Supervision Randal Quarles last week requesting a January briefing on efforts by the Fed and other prudential regulators to prepare banks for the transition away from the London Interbank Offered Rate.
Financial firms that have not started their work to transition from the London Interbank Offered Rate and making fallback plans for contracts—especially loans—that currently reference it need to begin right away, the Basel, Switzerland-based Financial Stability Board said in a progress report today on the reference rate transition.
Next year, the FSB expects to tackle fintech developments worldwide, including the growing role of big tech firms in finance; the development of so-called “stablecoins,” virtual currencies pegged to real assets to minimize volatility; innovation to remove friction in cross-border payments; and the transition away from the London Interbank Offered Rate to new benchmarks.
The Treasury’s Office of Financial Research flagged corporate credit, market, macroeconomic and cyber risk as elevated concerns in its annual financial stability report today.
The American Bankers Association joined several industry groups in a comment letter to the financial regulatory agencies this week supporting a long-awaited change to swap margin rules that would remove the requirement for covered swap entities to collect initial margin from affiliates.
In a Bloomberg op-ed on Friday, Tom Wipf—chairman of the Federal Reserve’s Alternative Reference Rates Committee and vice chairman of international securities at Morgan Stanley—pushed back against several common misconceptions about the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, the ARRC’s preferred replacement for the London Interbank Offered Rate.
The Alternative Reference Rates Committee today issued its recommended fallback language for residential adjustable-rate mortgages that reference the London Interbank Offered Rate.