LIBOR (London Interbank Overnight Rate) is a rather recent concept, even if English banks had been in banking business for many decades before the invention of LIBOR as the world's favorite benchmark for cost of money. LIBOR emerged in the 1980s to serve as a benchmark to account for interest rate risk when a surge in the use of futures contracts began to trouble lending decisions. Futures have been offered since 1972, and by the 1980s had become a major risk-hedging instrument in the developed countries. Due to the absence of a reliable benchmark back then, a solution was sought from the Bank of England. The banking industry trade group, the British Bankers' Association, launched LIBOR with the dollar, the yen and the pound sterling to have LIBOR serve as the benchmark.