And that, of course, my Lord Mayor includes the holders of your high office over so many years - and it includes the City Corporation. We at the Bank have enjoyed tremendous moral and practical - not to mention gastronomical - support in all our efforts to promote the reputation and prosperity of the City, and I hope that you may feel that we have been equally supportive of initiatives that you have taken to the same end. From my perspective it’s been a very warm and constructive relationship which I have no doubt will continue. You, Gavyn, have certainly contributed to that relationship during your period in office and I am grateful to you for that. But more than that you have maintained the finest traditions of the Mayoralty in the lead that you have given to the City. You have taken on an exhausting - and in this case I really mean exhausting - program - both at home and around the world in promotion of our interests and you have still found time, with the Lady Mayoress, to entertain us right royally this evening. We are all most grateful to you. So to you all - as I make the transition from Who’s Who? To Who’s He? - I say thank you and farewell until we meet again - as I very much hope we will if ever Vanessa and I manage to tear ourselves away from Cornwall.
This means that movements in the Libor that are not in line with the SNB’s monetary policy objectives have to be countered with a change in repo rates. Thus, over the course of the turbulence, we consistently offset changes in Libor risk premia with changes in the repo rate, as shown in chart 4. For this reason, the Libor remained in the middle of the target band during the whole episode. The Swiss franc Libor was much more stable during the turmoil than the Libor for other currencies. This simply means that we were able to protect the Swiss economy from part of the crisis-induced increase in risk premia. Libor criticised Recently, some market observers have questioned the information value of the Libor. The Libor for all major currencies is fixed daily in London by the British Bankers Association  2  BIS Review 80/2008  (BBA) on the basis of a survey of top-rated international banks. Critics argued that some banks would report unduly low Libor rates, in an effort to talk up their creditworthiness. Others claimed that the rates were too high because the panel of reporting banks was not sufficiently representative. These criticisms almost exclusively concerned the dollar Libor. The BBA has found no evidence of a systematic distortion of the Libor, and has announced that it is leaving the fixing method for the Libor unchanged. However, it will strengthen governance of the Libor fixing process, especially the monitoring of individual banks’ reports.