| Summary: | <p>Libor is a financial benchmark – a daily published number incorporated into financial contracts of all kinds for the purposes of establishing financial valuations. It has played a vital role in global finance for decades, with an influence that extends beyond the markets in which it is created and serves its primary purposes, and into everyday economic life. The global financial crisis of 2007/8 sparked a set of debates that has seen Libor’s reform, and ultimately replacement, top the financial regulatory agenda. But while these issues have attracted interest from social scientists and legal scholars alike, existing scholarship tends to take for granted the ruling conception of a benchmark as a calculative device. Libor’s effects on the distribution of wealth and power in society are seen as having to do with ‘underlying’ market realities or else sociological factors such as status, networks, or social norms. The benchmark itself is often analytically invisible. </p>
<p>In contrast, this thesis asks how Libor has been made into an object of critique since the financial crisis – that is, how has Libor been made into a ‘problem’ in need of reform? The thesis uses an in-depth, qualitative case study of the UK aspects of Libor reform to analyse the nature and effects of this problematisation and thereby to illuminate the configuration of power relations entailed in contemporary financial governance. I show that a benchmark such as Libor is a legal artefact whose role is to obviate debate about what things are ‘really’ worth by providing a measure that allows transactions to take place as if that debate was resolved. I refer to this as the benchmark form. I argue that, as a modern-day benchmark form, Libor has its analogue and historical template in the institution of money as a technical means of commensurating values in economic exchange.</p>
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