King joins Libor drama

Up to now, Sir Mervyn King has played largely a walk-on part in the Libor scandal, prompting Bob Diamond’s resignation after he warned Barclays that the regulators no longer had confidence in Diamond’s leadership of the bank. Now the Governor of the Bank of England has also been dragged into the drama after email exchanges released by the Bank revealed that he was aware of deliberate misreporting of the rate in June 2008.

Timothy Geithner, who was then the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, emailed Sir Mervyn with a list of recommendations for improving Libor, one of which tackles how to ‘eliminate incentive to misreport’. The Governor forwarded this on to his deputy Paul Tucker, and replied to Geithner that his recommendations ‘seem sensible to us’. Meanwhile transcripts released by the Fed revealed one Barclays employee saying: ‘We know we’re not posting, um, an honest Libor.’