Is this crunch time for the credit crunch? Yesterday, the three-month dollar Libor rate, at which big banks lend to each other, fell below 1 per cent for the first time. Libor is a vital benchmark for world finance but nobody much noticed it until banks started hoarding cash in the summer of 2007, prompting the crisis.
With credit so cheap, those in need of it are less “crunched”. The huge amounts of money thrown at this problem since Libor peaked almost five percentage points higher than it is now have had an effect.
But Libor still shows that all is not well. The extra “spread” of Libor over the Fed funds rate, a measure of banks' trust in each other, is almost 0.75 percentage points – far below its extreme following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy last September, but no lower than it was ahead of that disaster, and far above the spreads that were typical before the crisis first took hold.