By the 1990s, basis risk had caused bond markets, like money markets before them, to start shifting from the use of government rates as benchmarks to the use of private ones. Developments since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-09, including derivatives reforms and Libor scandals, had the...

We analyse the turnover of fixed income derivatives in seven currencies to test the hypothesis that market participants increasingly use contracts based on private rather than government rates to hedge and to take positions. In the US dollar money market, private benchmarks long ago displaced...