By all accounts it was worth waiting for.
The 10th Procrastination Research Conference, held last month in Chicago, featured sixty professionals – mostly psychologists and behavioral economists – from around the world. Besides reviewing the latest findings in this unusual field, attendees discussed why so many people – one in five of us – qualify as procrastinators.
Even this high-level gathering was sensitive to the issue of putting off things until the last minute. “There’s no day-of registration,” the wife of the conference chair reported.
Speaking of delaying tactics, UK banking regulators announced in July that the London Interbank Offered Rate, also known as Libor, will be replaced. But not anytime soon. The financial industry has until 2021 to establish a new benchmark rate.
Begun in 1986 as an agreement among the top London banks, Libor averaged interest rates at which those banks were theoretically lending to each other. Its function initially was as a pricing gauge for corporate lending. But it quickly grew to encompass other financial instruments. At its peak of popularity, Libor was the benchmark rate for $350 trillion of mortgages, derivatives, bonds, and leveraged loans.
As the financial crisis unfolded in early 2008, reports of the rate’s unreliability began to surface. With no underlying