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pcaspers
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Posts: 30
Joined: June 6th, 2005, 9:49 am
Location: Germany

Negative Libor Fixings

September 23rd, 2012, 9:54 am

people are discussing negative Libor / Euribor fixings, premiums for zero strike floors on these indices etc. my personal - maybe naive - view on this is that while the bid side might be (slightly) negative, for offer it makes little sense, therefore the fixings should not go negative. for repo rates it might be different, because a repo may be viewed as a portfolio of a long position in unsecured cash lending and a short position in security lending, where the rates for the latter might be higher than for the former.does that make sense? what are your thoughts on this?
 
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Martinghoul
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Joined: July 18th, 2006, 5:49 am

Negative Libor Fixings

September 25th, 2012, 10:38 am

We have discussed this in the past... There's no reason whatsoever why LIBOR fixings can't go negative in theory. It's not very likely, however.
 
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lepolo7
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Joined: September 20th, 2010, 5:42 am

Negative Libor Fixings

September 28th, 2012, 4:37 am

It did happen inthe 70's for the CHF, at the time they had foreign exchange restrictions ... Nowadays, the EUROSwiss futures are trading above 100 !!!Looking back at the past 10 years, I would say that anything is possible !!!And the Euro crisis is not finished yet ....
 
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pcaspers
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Posts: 30
Joined: June 6th, 2005, 9:49 am
Location: Germany

Negative Libor Fixings

September 29th, 2012, 3:00 pm

According to the bba libor documentation the panel banks should provide rates which answer"At what rate could you borrow funds, were you to do so by asking for and then accepting inter-bank offers in a reasonable market size just prior to 11 am?"For euribor you can download the panel bank quotes. In the last days JPM provided the lowest quotes being 1bp for the maturities up to 1m. Still positive. Maybe the lowest value you can input into the reuters thompson software used to collect the quotes :-) ? A negative fixing would mean that at least some of the panel banks say "I can borrow a reasonable amount of money from another bank, unsecured, and will even be paid interest for that". Still don't get it.Of course if the fixing is something artificial as outrun says, then it might get negative and dependent derivatives like the 3m futures can trade above 100. Which they do currently, so appearently this seems to be true. But then I doubt that the fixing is then a value in the spirit of the definition above ?