The Wholesale Price of Trust: LIBOR's Rise and Fall

Why do banks, the places with the vaults, need to borrow from each other? This episode unpacks the hidden plumbing of global finance: the overnight interbank market, the rise and scandalous fall of LIBOR, and its replacement, SOFR. We trace how a rate based on hypothetical guesses came to underpin $200 trillion in contracts, how traders manipulated it with casual messages, and why the new system—anchored in a trillion dollars of daily repo trades—is more honest but raises new questions about early warning signals in a crisis. Episode #256022 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/256022