Finance

Why Libor Retirement is the new Y2K

With the coming December 2021 retirement of LIBOR, Chief Data Officers in financial institutions are preparing to face their Y2K moment. An estimated $350 trillion of financial instruments are linked to this globally accepted benchmark rate for short-term loans, including adjustable rate mortgages, credit cards, student loans, bonds, securities and more. The data management challenge is colossal. Over 100 million transactions reference LIBOR and must be replaced with alternative risk-free rates (“RFRs”), such as SOFR for the U.S. dollar and SONIA in the UK. Making the switch won’t be a simple search-and-replace exercise. Here’s why:

RFRs are overnight rates, whereas LIBOR is published for multiple terms (e.g., one-week, three-month, etc.).
Credit risks are embedded in LIBOR, while RFRs are “risk-free,” making a simple conversion impossible.
RFRs have different behavioral characteristics than LIBOR, resulting in different historical spreads, so fallback rates must be applied.

Instead of viewing the LIBOR transition as just another costly, resource-consuming exercise, organizations should see this change a catalyst to uplevel and automate their data management processes to better understand and trust their data. Here are some benefits that one large financial institution told ASG they received from implementing an automated data intelligence system in just four months:

Discovered LIBOR rates across 150 Applications and 20,000 Cobol programs.
Solved a nine-month attestation request from their largest client that was being passed from department to department in search of a root cause.
Shrunk their footprint of redundant applications, including consolidating ten UDTs to one!

With these successes, this data governance organization was able to easily justify additional investment for other use case

Finance

Euro zone ministers expect inflation to slow in 2022

The acceleration of euro zone inflation, driven energy prices, is mostly temporary. Then the price growth will slow down again. The euro zone finance ministers agreed that, that too the next year as forecasted by the European Central Bank and the European Commission.

Paschal Donohoe, chaired the talks of the ministers in Luxembourg. In a news conference he said that there was also agreement that the inflation spike was not an argument against the transition to renewable sources of energy. This is under the EU’s ambitious plan of reducing CO2 emissions to zero by the year 2050.

Finance

Under new rules, borrowing for investment sensible

British finance minister Rishi Sunak said that the government borrowing to fund investment was a sensible thing. This is to allow under new fiscal rules that he is likely to announce, unlike borrowing for day-to-day spending. He said that borrowing for capital investment that is going to drive up their growth is probably a sensible thing for them. And that too particularly in an environment of slightly lower interest rate. Sunak stated this in an event on the sidelines of the annual conference of Britain’s ruling Conservative Party. This event was organized by the Taxpayers’ Alliance advocacy group. Sunak stated in that event, that borrowing for more day-to-day spending is probably less something that you would want to have as part of your framework.

Finance

IMF board to interview Georgieva-sources

The International Monetary Fund’s executive board is going to interview Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva. This is regarding that; its reviews claims that she pressured World Bank staff to alter data to favor China in her previous role. Board members were initially expected to meet with Georgieva. But spent their time working on other regular business matters.

The board members spent hours for questioning lawyers from the WilmerHale firm. This is about their World Bank investigation report which alleged that Georgieva, as the bank‘s CEO applied undue pressure on staff, to alter data in the flagship “Doing Business” report to benefit China. Then, an IMF spokesperson said that the IMF board remains committed to a thorough, objective, and timely review of the matter. Georgieva has strongly denied the accusations.

The upcoming interviews could prove pivotal in either increasing support for Georgieva. This is with many IMF shareholders are keen to wrap up the board’s deliberations on the matter. The fund’s most influential member governments, including the top shareholder the United States, have withheld public judgment. The World Bank tasked WilmerHale with investigating the “Doing Business” data irregularities identified in 2020. The law firm’s report contends Georgieva. The former World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s office pressured staff to manipulate data so that the China’s global ranking in the “Doing Business 2018” study of investment climates rose to 78th from 85th.