The Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (“ICE”) recently released a consultation that the administrator of LIBOR, ICE Benchmark Administration Limited (“IBA”), requesting feedback on a decision to cease publication of the overnight, one-, three-, six- and twelve-month U.S. Dollar LIBOR (“LIBOR”). The previous expectation was that publication would stop at the end of 2021. It now appears that IBA will cease publication of these tenors in June 2023, while they will plan to cease publication of one-week and two-month LIBOR at the end of 2021. Respondents are asked to provide feedback by January 25, 2021.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) has acknowledged the ICE publication and issued a statement to encourage market participants to continue work to convert their legacy IBOR contracts to include more robust fallback language, particularly the ISDA fallback language.

The Federal Reserve Board (“FRB”), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation released a joint statement praising the extension to June 2023, which they state will provide legacy LIBOR contracts time to mature.

The FRB also independently issued a statement in support of the IBA’s consultation praising a clear end date for USD LIBOR. They state that these announcements are a critical step to an orderly wind-down of USD LIBOR.

Federal banking agencies also issued a statement on November 6, 2020 reminding banking organizations to include new reference rates or fallback language in new contracts as opposed to only referencing LIBOR. We discussed the replacement rates statement in a recent blog post.

Norton Rose Fulbright has assembled a group of its attorneys from around the globe to stay on top of these issues and assist clients in the transition to new reference rates. More information can be found here.