I’ve been following the Libor scandal with considerable interest. The former Chief Operating Officer of Barclays Jerry del Messier should be settling into his chair before the UK House of Commons Treasury Select Committee as I write these words – don’t worry, I’ve set the recorder for the BBC News Channel.
Perhaps we’ll find out the answer to why Jerry del Messier was cleared of rigging Libor on the grounds that, according to Barclays’ briefing note (pdf) issued ahead of Bob Diamond’s appearance before the Select Committee he:
“…concluded that an instruction had been passed down from the Bank of England not to keep LIBORs so high. He passed down an instruction to that effect to the submitters.”
on the basis of Diamond’s infamous note to file which suggested that Paul Tucker, Deputy Governer of the Bank of England had advised that:
“…while he was certain we did not need advice, that it did not always need to be the case that we appeared as high as we have recently.”
The mysteriousness of it all arises because Barclays was already lowering its Libor submissions. They admit that during the period Sept 2007 – April 2008:
“Less senior managers gave instructions to Barclays submitters to lower their LIBOR submissions. The origin of these instructions is not clear.”
You’d think that when Jerry del Messier told his rate-setters to “lowball”, someone might have mentioned that they were already doing it!
I really like the point in Barclays memo that:
“[del Messier’s] instruction became redundant after a few days as liquidity flowed back into the market.”
“Became” redundant? His instruction was already redundant!
It’s not del Messier’s behaviour that really bothers me about the whole affair. It seems all the banks were at it, and Barclays may not have been the worst culprit. Barclays is just the first to settle. And the only logical explanation I can think of for George Osborne’s strange claim that Libor lowballing was sanctioned by Balls, Brown and Vadera is that it was an open secret in the City.
After all, no-one would borrow at a rate inflated by concerns that the banks might fail, as opposed to one simply reflecting risk, the base rate and the balance between supply and demand for money. Libor simply doesn’t work in those circumstances. The authorities would be obliged to address the problem any way they could in order to save the economy.
I hate to see public bullying. It seems our politicians – and many in the media and, notably, Mervyn King – just don’t like Bob Diamond. What will they do when they run out of obvious scapegoats? The excuse for laying into Diamond seems to be some problem with the “culture” at Barclays. Is it any different to that at any other investment bank? Doesn’t the “culture” in any occupation go with the turf? Presumably they don’t want traders to behave like, say, Premier League footballers, or Hollywood actors. Something less flash perhaps: doctors, say or IT guys. But would they still be able to do the job? These occupations surely require quite different qualities and aptitudes. Maybe something a little more sales oriented, perhaps, then: used car dealers or estate agents. Or politicians! But are these professions more or less honest than investment banking? I’m stuck. Perhaps our politicians could spell out exactly how they want investment bankers to behave.
Or perhaps Mervyn King could tell us. After all, he’s the one who fired Bob Diamond – never mind that the regulatory investigation is far from complete. Is he going to fire the heads of a dozen other banks?
Never mind that the real reason seems to be some problem with Barclays “culture”, it’s not actually Mervyn King’s job to sack the Chief Executives of banks. Or anyone else employed by a bank for that reason. And even if it was King’s job, he would be obliged to follow due process.
Diamond could be forced to step down if the Financial Services Authority found he was not a “fit and proper” person. Which didn’t happen.
Or if he lost the confidence of Barclays’ shareholders. He might have done, I suppose, but that’s not why he went.
No, Marcus Agius (Barclays Chairman and ex-Chairman) explained what happened:
“Agius told MPs that the chief executive had quit ‘because it became clear that he lost the support of his regulators’ just 48 hours before the American-born Diamond was scheduled to appear before the committee.
Agius described how he had been summoned, along with Sir Michael Rake, the most senior non-executive director on the Barclays board, to see King shortly after Agius’s resignation had been announced a week ago on Monday.
‘We had a conversation in which he said that Bob Diamond no longer enjoyed the support of his regulators,’ said Agius, who then had to hold an emergency board meeting by telephone of non-executive directors to decide how to proceed. He admitted to being shocked as concerns had not been raised when the £290m fine for attempting to manipulate Libor rigging emerged five days earlier.
Agius said he and Rake went to Diamond’s home on the Monday evening. Diamond – who had insisted to MPs last week that he did not know about any regulatory pressures – ‘was not in a good place’, said Agius. He said that the conversation was ‘not long’ and that Diamond had asked for time to talk to his family.
‘I left his [Diamond’s] house confident he would resign, if he hadn’t done so already,’ Agius said.”
Staggering.
I’m surprised there’s not been more outcry at such authoritarian behaviour by the Governor of the Bank of England, who is, after all, just a public official.
One exception is Philip Inman who provides some background in a Guardian piece titled “How Mervyn King Finally Got Bob Diamond.”
“…from the moment the credit crunch began to wreck Northern Rock’s finances in the summer of 2007, the grammar-school boy from Wolverhampton, whose father was a railway worker and then a geography teacher, was ready with his analysis. King said most of the huge debts accumulated by banks could be tied to the huge bonuses executives received as reward for their lending.
In meetings with regulators and then chancellor Alistair Darling, Diamond, then head of Barclays Capital, and his investment banking peers were seen as a bunch of amoral, greedy traders. Darling relates in his diaries how King would counsel against providing rescue funds that perpetuated a risk-taking culture.
But it was Diamond, one of nine children and also the son of a teacher, who made it public and personal. At a time when most bankers were busy trying to prevent their institutions going bust, he broke cover to give an interview in a Sunday newspaper. In an analysis of central banks’ actions in combating the credit squeeze, Diamond notably excluded the Bank of England from praise.
He said providing short-term cash was the job of a central bank. ‘For the recovery to continue we need to find more ways to get liquidity into the short end of the curve,’ he said. ‘That’s down to confidence, and that’s down to the central banks. We’ve seen thoughtful moves by the [US Federal Reserve] and the [European Central Bank].’
The Bank of England saw the interview as a direct attack on its handling of the crisis. King’s response was to embark on a series of speeches and interviews in which he openly decried the emergence of a ‘small elite’ that agreed to pay itself bonuses in good times and bad.”
So petty. Maybe Mervyn is touchy – I think Diamond was right. Perhaps, if King had behaved more like other central bankers, we’d have a healthier banking industry today, and Ed Miliband wouldn’t be threatening to break up the survivors to create more competition. Don’t forget that Alliance & Leicester, Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock have all disappeared from our high streets.
What’s more, blaming the financial crisis on bank bonuses is simplistic to say the least.
And perhaps central bankers should have seen the housing bubble warning signs a bit earlier.
Another commentator who hasn’t let the matter pass is Hugo Dixon who suggests at Reuter’s that the “BoE governor’s arm-twisting raises tricky issues”:
“…on whose behalf exactly was King speaking? The BoE, after all, is not responsible for supervising banks – and won’t be until next year. That’s still the job of the Financial Services Authority. If King wasn’t speaking for the FSA too, he was arguably stepping beyond his authority.
On the other hand, if the BoE governor was speaking on the FSA’s behalf, why didn’t the regulator itself deliver the message that Diamond should go? And why too did the FSA apparently change its position? After all, the regulator had only just agreed a settlement with Barclays over the Libor rate-fixing scandal. If it had wanted Diamond to go, that would have been the moment to say so.
A further question is how exactly the regulators managed to twist Barclays’ arm. If the FSA doesn’t support a bank director in his role, the current mechanism for removing the executive is to deem him no longer ‘fit and proper’. But it seems hard to argue that Diamond didn’t meet that test. After all, the lengthy investigation into the Libor scandal did not criticise him personally.
Some people will no doubt say it is good that Diamond has gone and it doesn’t really matter how that was engineered. But methods used in difficult situations can easily become precedents.
The BoE is about to become even more powerful next year when it takes over banking supervision. It is important that it operates in a transparent and accountable fashion.”
Quite.
Uncharted Territory 