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This edition first published 2017
© 2017 Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vaughan, Liam, author. | Finch, Gavin, author.
Title: The fix : how bankers lied, cheated and colluded to rig the world’s most important number / Liam Vaughan, Gavin Finch.
Description: Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom : John Wiley & Sons, 2017. | Series: Bloomberg Press | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043338 (print) | LCCN 2016057070 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118995723 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118995747 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118995730 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Commercial crimes—Great Britain—Case studies. | Banks and banking—Corrupt practices—Case studies. | Financial institutions, International—Corrupt practices—Case studies. | Interest rates. | LIBOR market model.
Classification: LCC HV6771.G7 V38 2017 (print) | LCC HV6771.G7 (ebook) | DDC 364.16/80941—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043338
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-118-99572-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-118-99573-0 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-118-99574-7 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-118-99575-4 (O-book)
Cover design: Wiley
Cover image: City image © Petr Student/Shutterstock; Puppet image © Rudek/Shutterstock
To Robert, a class act
There were four of us at a table by the bar, eyeing each other with suspicion: two reporters, a highly paid derivatives trader in his early thirties, and a lawyer who had cautiously brokered the meeting. We'd just written a story about how the trader and a handful of his colleagues had been sacked, and he was incensed. His reputation was ruined, and he was aggravated by what he saw as the fundamental ignorance of the press. Did we even understand what Libor was? Did we understand what Libor had become?
On that chilly afternoon in February 2012, at a near-empty hotel bar in central London, the word “Libor” had not yet entered the public vernacular. In the world of finance, it was common. Libor was the name of a benchmark interest rate, one that was both mundane—it was just a measure of how much it cost banks to borrow from each other—and extraordinary. Libor was in everything, from mortgages in Alabama to business loans in Liverpool to the hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money given to banks during the financial crisis. It was sometimes called the “world's most important number”, and the trader sitting across from us was accused of trying to manipulate it.1 From his body language it was clear he didn't want to be here, but he was desperate. So were we. We didn't even know his name.2
“Why do you need to know that?” he snapped when we asked. He had heavy bags under his dark, narrow eyes. All we needed to appreciate, the trader insisted, was that Libor wasn't what we thought it was. “There are no rules,” he said, avoiding eye contact. “There never have been. This is all a fucking joke.” When we pressed him for specifics, he clammed up. After the second round of drinks arrived, we tried a different approach. What was it we didn't understand?
The trader shook his head impatiently. Discussing Libor with colleagues and counterparts was as much a part of life on the trading floor as debauched nights out and crude language, he said. It had been going on forever and was widely condoned by management. But it had gotten more complicated than that, he continued. Libor had broken down. It was supposed to be a measure of how much lenders paid each other to borrow cash, but since the crisis, banks no longer lent to each other at all. Libor had become a fictional construct, dreamed up each day in the minds of a group of bankers with a vested interest in where it was set. The world's most important number was a fraud.
After an hour and a half, the trader relented and gave us his name. We asked if we could meet again and struck a deal: If we promised never to mention our meetings in our articles, he said he would guide us through the secretive, close-knit world of derivatives trading—a rarefied ecosystem where mathematically gifted young men bet billions of dollars of their employers’ money on movements in complex securities few people understand, then come together in restaurants and clubs in the evenings to enjoy the spoils.
The party was ending fast. A few days earlier, the first official document alleging Libor manipulation at a group of major banks had leaked. The affidavit filed by antitrust authorities in a court in Canada was light on details and, beyond a few brief news items, attracted little interest from the mainstream media. Still, we were intrigued. One of the more shocking aspects of the case was that the traders involved worked for the very banks whose recklessness had helped bring the global financial system to its knees in 2008. We had listened to kowtowing executives from bailed-out behemoths like UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland and Citigroup tell the public how they had reformed. If the Libor allegations were true, rather than learning their lesson, the banks were behaving worse than ever.
Six traders and brokers were named in the Canadian document, but the individual who was pulling the strings—the kingpin at the center of the conspiracy—was referred to only as Trader A. This was tantalizing. How had he done it? How had one man managed to shift one of the central pillars of the financial system in the years when the banking authorities were supposedly at their most vigilant? And what kind of individual would have the chutzpah to even try?
At the bar in London, before we parted ways, we asked the trader one final question: “Who is Trader A?”
“Pretty sure that's Tom Hayes,” he said. “He's just some weird, quiet kid who completely owned the market before he blew up.”
By the summer of 2012, Libor was front-page news. In June, Barclays became the first bank to reach a settlement with authorities around the world, admitting to rigging the rate and agreeing to pay a then-record £290 million ($355 million) in fines. The British lender avoided criminal charges thanks to its extensive cooperation with the investigation, but the fallout was devastating. The scandal coincided with the eurozone debt crisis and a renewed period of seething disdain for the banking sector. News bulletins cut from riots in Athens and Occupy Wall Street protests in New York to transcripts of traders calling each other “big boy” and agreeing to defraud the public for a “bottle of Bollinger”. Within a week, Barclays's charismatic chief executive officer, Bob Diamond, had been forced to resign, and the reputation of the Bank of England, which was accused of being directly involved in the U.K. lender's behavior, was in shreds.
Barclays bore the worst of the public opprobrium, but it wasn't alone. Swiss lender UBS settled with the authorities in December, followed quickly by taxpayer-owned RBS, Dutch bank Rabobank and interdealer brokers ICAP and RP Martin. To date, about a dozen firms and more than 100 individuals have been implicated from all over the world. In an era defined by the breakdown in trust between banks and the rest of society, Libor has confirmed people's worst suspicions about the financial system: That behind closed doors, shrouded in complexity and protected by weak and complicit regulators, armies of bankers are gleefully spending their days screwing us over.
The reality is both more complex and more shocking than that. The picture that emerges over thousands of pages of public and leaked documents and hundreds of interviews we conducted—with the traders and brokers involved in the scandal, the regulators and central bankers who failed to curb them, and the small, tenacious band of U.S. investigators who ultimately brought them to account—is of a system in which manipulation was not just possible but inevitable. Everyone must take their share of responsibility: the bank executives who fostered a culture where making money trumped all else; the authorities too weak or unwilling to ask awkward questions; and the governments, giddy on tax receipts, who ushered in a style of laissez-faire regulation whose disastrous effects are still being felt today.
At its heart, though, this is a story about a group of traders and brokers who found a flaw in the machine and exploited it for all it was worth. Despite their actions, the men who shared their stories with us are not one-dimensional hucksters unburdened by a conscience. For the most part, they are smart, likeable men—and they are all men—who love their children and cry at sad movies and who somewhere along the way convinced themselves that responsibility for their behavior lay with the system rather than themselves.
As we were putting this book together, the doping allegations against Tour de France legend Lance Armstrong were emerging. The parallels were striking. Within the closed ranks of both banking and cycling, the bounds of what constituted acceptable behavior had diverged over time from the rest of society, cleaved by a heady mix of testosterone, competition, groupthink, lax oversight and skewed incentives. Both worlds also had their antiheroes—individuals who, through sheer will and force of personality, went further than anyone else, dragging behind them an entourage of enablers and co-conspirators.
In the case of Libor, the antihero is Tom Hayes: a brilliant, obsessive, reckless, irascible math prodigy who transformed rate-rigging from a blunt instrument into a thing of intricate, terrible beauty. A socially awkward misfit in his early years, he found his calling the moment he walked onto a trading floor, where the idiosyncrasies that had dogged him his whole life became assets. They made him a fortune before they sealed his downfall. This is his journey. This is the story of Trader A.
At the Tokyo headquarters of a Swiss bank, in the middle of a deserted trading floor, Tom Hayes sat rapt before a bank of eight computer screens. Collar askew, pale features pinched, blond hair mussed from a habit of pulling at it when he was deep in thought, the British trader was even more disheveled than usual. It was Sept. 15, 2008, and it looked, in Hayes's mind, like the end of the world.
Hayes had been awakened at dawn in his apartment by a call from his boss, telling him to get into the office immediately. In New York, Lehman Brothers was hurtling toward bankruptcy. At his desk, Hayes watched the world process the news and panic. Each market as it opened became a sea of flashing red as investors frantically dumped their holdings. In moments like this, Hayes entered an almost unconscious state, rapidly processing the tide of information before him and calculating the best escape route.
Hayes was a phenom at UBS, one of the best the bank had at trading derivatives. So far, the mounting financial crisis had actually been good for him. The chaos had let him buy cheaply from those desperate to get out and sell high to the unlucky few who still needed to trade. While most dealers closed up shop in fear, Hayes, with a seemingly limitless appetite for risk, stayed in. He was 28, and he was up more than $70 million for the year.
Now that was under threat. Not only did Hayes have to extract himself from every deal he'd done with Lehman, but he'd also made a series of enormous bets that in the coming days interest rates would remain stable. The collapse of the fourth-largest investment bank in the U.S. would surely cause those rates, which were really just barometers of risk, to spike. As Hayes examined his tradebook, one rate mattered more than any other: the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, a benchmark that influences $350 trillion of securities and loans around the world. For traders like Hayes, this number was the Holy Grail. And two years earlier, he had discovered a way to rig it.
Libor was set by a self-selected, self-policing committee of the world's largest banks. The rate measured how much it cost them to borrow from each other. Every morning, each bank submitted an estimate, an average was taken and a number was published at midday. The process was repeated in different currencies, and for various amounts of time, ranging from overnight to a year. During his time as a junior trader in London, Hayes had gotten to know several of the 16 individuals responsible for making their bank's daily submission for the Japanese yen. His flash of insight was realizing that these men mostly relied on interdealer brokers, the fast-talking middlemen involved in every trade, for guidance on what to submit each day.
Hayes saw what no one else did because he was different. His intimacy with numbers, his cold embrace of risk and his manias were more than professional tics; they were signs that he'd been wired differently since birth. Hayes would not be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome until 2015, when he was 35, but his co-workers, many of them savvy operators from fancy schools, often reminded Hayes that he wasn't like them. They called him “Rain Man”.1 Most traders looked down on brokers as second-class citizens, too. Hayes recognized their worth. He'd been paying some of them to lie ever since.
By the time the market opened in London, Lehman's demise was official. Hayes instant-messaged one of his trusted brokers in the U.K. capital to tell him what direction he wanted Libor to move. Typically, he skipped any pleasantries. “Cash mate, really need it lower,” Hayes typed. “What's the score?” The broker sent his assurances and, over the next few hours, followed a well-worn playbook. Whenever one of the Libor-setting banks called and asked his opinion on what the benchmark would do, the broker said—incredibly, given the calamitous news—that the rate was likely to fall. Libor may have featured in hundreds of trillions of dollars of loans and derivatives, but this was how it was set: conversations among men who were, depending on the day, indifferent, optimistic or frightened. When Hayes checked the official figures later that night, he saw to his inexpressible relief that yen Libor had fallen.
Hayes was not out of danger yet. Over the next three days, he barely left the office, surviving on three hours of sleep a night. As the market convulsed, his profit and loss jumped around from minus $20 million to plus $8 million in just hours, but Hayes had another ace up his sleeve. ICAP, the world's biggest interdealer broker, sent out a “Libor prediction” e-mail each morning at around 7 a.m. to the individuals at the banks responsible for submitting Libor. Hayes messaged an insider at the firm and instructed him to skew the predictions lower. Amid the bedlam, Libor was the one thing Hayes believed he had some control over. He cranked his network to the max, offering his brokers extra payments for their cooperation and calling in favors at banks around the world. By Thursday, Sept. 18, Hayes was exhausted. This was the moment he'd been working toward all week. If Libor jumped today, his puppeteering would have been for naught. Libor moves in increments called basis points, equal to one one-hundredth of a percentage point, and every tick was worth roughly $750,000 to his bottom line.
For the umpteenth time since Lehman faltered, Hayes reached out to his brokers in London. “I need you to keep it as low as possible, all right?” he told one of them in a message. “I'll pay you, you know, $50,000, $100,000, whatever. Whatever you want, all right?”
“All right,” the broker repeated.
“I'm a man of my word,” Hayes said.
“I know you are. No, that's done, right, leave it to me,” the broker said.
Hayes was still in the office when that day's Libors were published at noon in London, 8 p.m. in Tokyo. The yen rate had fallen 1 basis point, while comparable money market rates in other currencies continued to soar. Hayes's crisis had been averted. Using his network, he had personally sought to tilt part of the planet's financial infrastructure. He pulled off his headset and headed home to bed. He'd only recently upgraded from the superhero duvet he'd slept under since he was eight years old.
Thomas Alexander William Hayes had always been an outsider. Born in 1979 and raised in the urban sprawl of Hammersmith, West London, Hayes was bright but found it hard to connect with other kids. His parents divorced when he was in primary school. When his mother Sandra remarried, she took Hayes and his younger brother Robin to live with her new husband, a management consultant, and his two children in the leafy, affluent commuter town of Winchester, bordering a stretch of bucolic countryside in the south of England. The couple fostered a child and later had a daughter of their own. They bought a big house on a pretty street lined with them. It was always full.
Hayes's mother was a naturally timid woman, and when Hayes misbehaved or became angry, she did everything she could to placate him. From an early age few people said no to him. In his teenage years, Hayes saw less of his father Nick, a left-wing journalist and documentary filmmaker who relocated to Manchester in the north of the country with his girlfriend, a crossword writer for The Guardian newspaper. Hayes attended Westgate, a well-regarded state secondary school a 10-minute walk from his new home, and then Peter Symonds, a sixth-form college that was even closer. His college math teacher, Tania Zeigler, remembers him as a “kind, thoughtful and normal” student.1 Hayes achieved good grades but had a small circle of friends. Awkward and quiet, with lank, scraggly hair and acne, he rarely socialized and wouldn't learn to drive until he was in his thirties. When he did venture to the pub, he usually had one eye on the slot machines, waiting to pounce after someone else had emptied his pockets. Surrounded by the children of well-to-do professionals, he held onto his inner-city London accent, traveling back on weekends to watch his beloved football team, the perennial underdogs Queens Park Rangers.
Hayes was a decent footballer, but from a young age favored solitary pastimes that fostered his natural ability for mathematics: computer games, puzzles and an ardent devotion to QPR, which offered a nerd's paradise of statistics, history and results to pore over. Fixations—along with social problems, elevated stress levels and a propensity for numbers over words—are a symptom of Asperger's, but in the years before works like The Imitation Game and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time made the condition better understood, Hayes just struck people as withdrawn.
Hayes remained a peripheral figure at the University of Nottingham, where he studied math and engineering. While his fellow students took their summer holidays, he worked 90-hour weeks cleaning pots and pulling pints behind the bar of a local pub for £2.70 an hour. He had no desire to go abroad when he could be earning money. Even when carrying out menial tasks, he prided himself on his dedication. “It didn't matter whether I was cleaning a deep fat fryer or deboning a chicken, those jobs got left to me because they knew there would be no chicken left on the bone and there would be no fat in the fryer,” Hayes would later explain. “That's just the way I am.”2
Toward the end of his course he secured a 10-week internship at UBS in London, working on the collateral-management desk, a mundane but complex station where it was difficult to stand out. But Hayes did, and the Swiss bank offered him a full-time role when he finished his studies. Hayes turned it down in order to find a trading position. That's where the real excitement was.
After graduating in 2001, Hayes got his wish, joining the rapidly expanding RBS as a trainee on the interest-rate derivatives desk. For 20 minutes a day, as a reward for making the tea and collecting dry cleaning, he was allowed to ask the traders anything he wanted. It was an epiphany. Unlike the messy interactions and hidden agendas that characterized day-to-day life, the formula for success in finance was clear: Make money and everything else will follow. It became Hayes's guiding principle, and he began to read voraciously about markets, options-pricing models, interest rate curves, and other financial arcana.
Within a year Hayes was given a small trading book to look after while its main trader in Asia was away from the office. His risk limits were tiny, but it gave Hayes real-time exposure to the financial instruments, such as swaps, that he would go on to master. His timing was perfect. Swaps, in which parties agree to exchange a floating rate of interest for a fixed one, were originally used to protect companies from fluctuations in interest rates. By the time Hayes arrived they were mostly bought and sold between professional traders at banks and hedge funds, another high-stakes security to wager the future on. In 1998, about $36 trillion of the instruments changed hands. Within seven years that had exploded to $169 trillion. By the end of the decade it was closer to $349 trillion.3 It was a gold rush.
In the laddish, hedonistic culture of the markets, the 21-year-old Hayes was an odd fit. On the rare occasions he joined bankers and brokers on their nights out, Hayes stuck to hot chocolate. They called him “Tommy Chocolate” behind his back and blurted out Rain Man quotes like “Qantas never crashed” as Hayes shuffled round the trading floor. He was bad at banter, given to taking quips and digs at face value. The superhero duvet was a particular point of derision. The bedding was perfectly adequate, Hayes thought; he didn't see the point in buying another one.
There were also signs of his soon-to-be notorious temper. According to one story that made its way round the City of London, Hayes began seeing a woman from his office and one night arranged to make her dinner. Hayes cooked, while his date had a bath. When he'd finished, he called for her to join him. After asking for a third time, Hayes became so irritated he barged into the bathroom and poured a dish of shepherd's pie into the bath with her. The episode quickly entered trading floor legend, and traders and brokers took to hollering “aye aye shepherd's pie” and “get in the bath!”.
At work, the complex calculations and constant mental exertion involved in trading derivatives came easily, but Hayes found he had something rarer: a steely stomach for risk. While other new recruits looked to book their gains or curb short-term losses, Hayes rode volatile market movements like a seasoned rodeo rider. In those early years he hit the dirt as often as he was successful, but his talent was clear and in 2004 he was headhunted by Royal Bank of Canada, a smaller outfit where Hayes could take a position of prominence and rise more quickly.
RBC's London operation wasn't set up to trade the full gamut of derivatives products, so Hayes spent the first year or so working with a team of quantitative analysts and IT specialists to bring the bank's systems up to his standards. Hayes was a perfectionist, and, still in his early twenties, he helped the firm design a platform that could monitor minute shifts in profit and loss and risk exposure in real time—a set-up more advanced than at many of the biggest players in the market. It was a process Hayes would go on to repeat each time he started at a new firm.
Finally, Hayes was satisfied, and he leapt into the market with his own trading book. Traders at the largest firms recall suddenly seeing minnow RBC taking the other side of big-ticket deals. Hayes may have been baffled by the simple rituals of office camaraderie, but when he looked at the convoluted world of yen derivatives he saw clarity. “The success of getting it right, the success of finding market inefficiencies, the success of identifying opportunities and then when you get it right—it's like solving that equation,” Hayes would later explain in his nasal, pedantic delivery. “It's make money, lose money, and it's just so pure.”4
In poker, there are two types of player: tight folk who wait for the best cards, then bet big and hope to get paid; and hawks who can't resist getting involved in every hand, needling opponents and scaring the nervous ones into folding. Hayes was firmly in the latter camp. His M.O. was to trade constantly, picking up snippets of information, racking up commissions as a market maker and building a persona as a high-volume, high-stakes risk-taker.
Hayes's success on the trading floor brought a newfound confidence to the naturally reticent young man. Trading is primarily a solitary pursuit, one individual's battle against the world, armed only with his guile, a bank of screens and a phone. Still, among the derivative traders and quants Hayes found kindred spirits, people for whom systems and patterns were second nature and who shared his passion for financial markets and economics. He was quick to dismiss those he considered lacking in talent. Salespeople—the polished, mostly privately educated, multilingual young men and women drafted in droves by prestigious investment banks to be their public face—were given particularly short shrift.
As a state-school-educated Londoner with a cockney twang and a love of football, Hayes felt he had more in common with the mostly working-class interdealer brokers who matched up buyers and sellers. Naturally suspicious of other people's intentions, Hayes took months before he warmed to a broker. Once he did, he called him incessantly, prodding him for information about rivals at other firms and scolding him if he felt he was getting quoted poor prices. If he pushed too far, slamming down the phone or dishing out profanities, he would call back to apologize and throw some extra business the broker's way. Hayes was loyal to those he considered to be on his side and merciless with anyone he didn't. Everything was black and white. The contacts he made early in his career at the banks and interdealer brokers in London would play a pivotal role later when his gaze fixed firmly on Libor.
For all the ribbing Hayes took on the trading floor, he had found a place where he belonged. He rose early, worked at least 12 hours a day and rarely stayed awake past 10 p.m. He often got up to check his trading positions during the night. And ultimately, Hayes went along with the jokes because the obsessive traits that had marginalized him socially turned into assets the moment he logged on to his terminal.
In the spring of 2006, a headhunter put Hayes in touch with an Australian banker named Anthony Robson who was recruiting for his sales desk at UBS. The pair met in a quiet corner of a branch of Corney & Barrow, a chain of basement haunts popular with City of London bankers where deals are forged over pints of ale and pie and mash. Within five minutes it was obvious to Robson that Hayes, with his scruffy demeanor and idiosyncrasies, wasn't suited to a client-facing role. But there was something undeniably intriguing about the blond-haired kid who barely broke for breath. For an hour and a half they talked about trading methodologies, interest-rate curves and derivatives pricing models. Hayes spoke with a zeal and depth of knowledge that left Robson astounded. When the meeting was over, Robson was convinced he'd met one of the most gifted individuals he'd ever interviewed. That night he put Hayes in contact with one of his counterparts in Tokyo.
In March 2006, the Japanese central bank had announced plans to curb overheating in the economy by raising interest rates for the first time in more than a decade. The move brought volatility to money markets that had been dormant, spurring a wave of buying and selling in cash, forwards and short-term interest-rate derivatives. Keen to capitalize, UBS was putting together a small team of front-end traders, who dealt in instruments that matured within two or three years. Hayes would be the perfect addition. At the time, yen was still considered something of a backwater within the banks, a steppingstone on the way to the big leagues of trading dollars or euros. The market was full of inexperienced traders not savvy enough to know when they were being fleeced. Hayes was nervous about moving to the other side of the world but sensed it was too good an opportunity to pass up.
RBS, RBC, UBS—the name on the door mattered little to Hayes, as long as he had the bank's balance sheet to wager. That summer he packed up his belongings, said goodbye to his family and boarded a flight to Tokyo. It was a major promotion that officially retired his image as a cocoa-sipping, blankie-clutching eccentric and recognized him for what he'd become: an aggressive and formidable trader. Headquartered in Zurich, UBS was a powerhouse, combining a vast balance sheet with a hard-charging Wall Street ethos and the freedom afforded by a hands-off Swiss regulator. The culture was aggressive and, as would later be proved, fatally predisposed to corruption.5 Traders were king, and as long as they were making money, few questions were asked.
Hayes found a small apartment a short subway ride to UBS's Tokyo headquarters. His girlfriend, a young British saleswoman he'd met at RBS named Sarah Ainsworth, moved to Tokyo with Calyon Securities around the same time. The relationship petered out. The couple never saw each other. One or two old contacts from London and some particularly persistent brokers dragged Hayes out for a pint now and then amid the neon lights of Tokyo, where a wealthy young expat could have some serious fun, but Hayes was irritatingly distracted company. He had developed a more rarefied addiction.
Interest-rate swaps, forward rate agreements, basis swaps, overnight indexed swaps—the menu of complex financial instruments Hayes bought and sold came in a thousand varieties, but they shared one thing in common: Their value rose and fell with reference to benchmark interest rates, and, in particular, to Libor. Where Libor would land the next day was the great unknowable. Yet it was the difference between success and failure, profit or loss, glory or ignominy. Trading, like any other form of gambling, involves attempting to build a sense of the future based on incomplete and evolving information: rumor, historic market behavior, macroeconomic events, business flows elsewhere inside the bank. The better information a trader has, the greater his edge and the more money he can make. It became Hayes's mission to control the chaos around him, to eradicate the shades of gray. “I used to dream about Libor,” Hayes said years later. “They were my bread and butter, you know. They were the instrument that underlined everything that I traded … I was obsessed.”6