Michael Held: Prepare for landing

Remarks (via videoconference) by Mr Michael Held, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the ISDA International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA)Benchmark Strategies Forum, 15 September 2021.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Central bank speech  | 
08 December 2021

As prepared for delivery

Thank you for that kind introduction, and for the opportunity to speak to you all today. As always, my remarks reflect my own views and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.

It's been almost exactly a year since I last spoke about LIBOR transition. My hope is that I won't be talking about LIBOR again next September because there won't be any need to say more about it. We'll see.

It seems that now, every speech about LIBOR needs some sort of metaphor, so I'm going to compare the transition away from LIBOR to bringing a very large airplane in for a landing. Like a 747 or an Airbus 380. I hope you can all remember what it was like to fly on an airplane-that's something we all used to do in the before times, right? This particular plane has had a very long flight, and the dotted lines on the little electronic map are approaching the destination. I think a lot of market participants have been focusing on U.S. dollar LIBOR's publication ending in June 2023. Now, that may seem to some like a long time away still, and so it's not yet time to make a last pass through the cabin collecting all the stray coffee cups and soda cans. And I don't disagree that June 2023 is an important date; by then, this plane needs to be safely landed and parked at the gate for an on-time arrival.