Inventor of LIBOR Interest Rate Has Died

Minos A. Zombanakis

Minos A. Zombanakis has died at the age of 92.

He was a pioneer in the so-called Euromarkets, a means of tapping the billions of dollars and other currencies held outside their countries of origin, notes The Wall Street Journal.

But even of greater significance, he was widely credited with originating the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, a global benchmark for pricing loans.


According to the Journal, he was born in the village of Kalyves on the Greek island of Crete in a house with dirt floors. He later earned degrees in economics and public administration at Harvard University, where a professorship of international finance was endowed in his name in 2010.

 The Journal explains the outsize use of the Libor rate:

[It] proliferated over the next four decades and eventually was the basis for pricing trillions of dollars of financial instruments ranging from home mortgages to derivatives used to bet on the direction of interest rates.

Of late, the rate has gotten a bad rap because of regulators claiming that traders have been manipulating the rate. What was really going on is something similar to a mild form of jaywalking (See: LIBOR Scandal Nonsense and More on the LIBOR "Scandal" ).

-RW