Lois: credit and liquidity

The spread between Libor and overnight index swap rates used to be negligible – until the crisis. Its behaviour since can be explained theoretically and empirically by a model driven by typical lenders’ liquidity and typical borrowers’ credit risk. By Stéphane Crépey and Raphaël Douady

Most fixed-income derivatives reference Libor or the euro interbank offered rate (Euribor), calculated daily at tenors up to a year as an average of the rates at which a panel of banks believe they can obtain unsecured funding. In the past, these were nearly identical to the overnight indexed swap (OIS) rates, which are calculated by compounding some rate reflecting the cost of unsecured overnight interbank lending, such as the federal funds rate or the euro overnight index average (Eonia) rate