Vanguard readies for life after LIBOR

An important benchmark in the financial industry, the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, will cease to exist after 2021. It is used as an input in setting the interest rates on a variety of financial products worldwide, including bonds, derivatives and loans to businesses and consumers.

Bloomberg has estimated the exposure of all financial instruments using LIBOR as a benchmark reference rate at $200 trillion in the United States and $350 trillion globally.¹

Why LIBOR is going away

Owing to a decline in short-term interbank lending volume, LIBOR has increasingly been based on the expert opinion of a panel of banks rather than on actual transactions. The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority, the oversight body regulating LIBOR since 2013, has reached an agreement ensuring the panel will continue submitting daily estimated borrowing rates only through December 2021, which explains why LIBOR is going to be discontinued.

A variety of different reference rates are being considered across the globe to replace LIBOR, but its successor in the United States is the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, or SOFR. This interest rate, published daily by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is based on transactions in Treasury repurchase agreements—overnight financing for banks that sell U.S. Treasuries and agree to repurchase them the next day for a set interest rate.

Vanguard’s preparations for the LIBOR transition

Because some Vanguard funds have exposure to LIBOR, we have established a governance program and developed a plan to help us navigate a transition away from that benchmark. This includes planning for our investment products’ LIBOR transition, remediating systems that display or use LIBOR in calculations, revising online and print materials, and exploring solutions to remediate existing legacy contracts to incorporate provisions for LIBOR transition and fallback language.

Count on Vanguard

We will continue to work toward the transition away from LIBOR while monitoring market developments and taking steps to ensure that it goes as smoothly as possible. Our focus while doing so will be, as always, to give our investors the best chance for investment success.