While the greenback gets flak, the U.K. is having has its own problems. For instance, that minor scrape with the London interbank offered rate. Like, why is it that a top bank everyone and their mother knew was exposed to crippling subprime losses was supposedly able to borrow massive amounts of money on the market at lower interest rates than its competitors?

Few companies have suffered from the subprime mortgage collapse more than UBS AG, which has taken $38 billion of writedowns and losses, replaced its chief executive officer and chairman and saw its stock tumble 60 percent.

Yet on 85 percent of the days between July and mid-April, the Zurich-based bank told the British Bankers' Association that it could borrow in the money markets at lower interest rates than its rivals. Not even the U.K.'s Lloyds TSB Group Plc, which only wrote down $1.4 billion, could obtain the rates UBS said it was able to get, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

"Even when the market knew UBS was massively exposed and Lloyds wasn't, that was not reflected in Libor," said Antony Broadbent, an independent banking consultant and former analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in London.

Such discrepancies are creating a crisis of confidence in the London interbank offered rate published daily by the London- based BBA and taken from the contributions of UBS, Lloyds TSB and 14 other banks. Rates on corporate bonds, leveraged buyouts loans, derivatives and even U.S. mortgages are pegged to Libor.

The criticism has prompted the BBA to accelerate a review of the 24-year-old system of setting rates. The findings, due May 30, may determine how fast the banking industry recovers from the credit crisis.

"You've got to fix Libor," said Tim Bond, head of asset allocation strategy in London at Barclays Capital, a unit of Barclays Plc, one of the banks that provide quotes to the BBA. "You don't ever want to be in a situation like this again, where people can get away with quoting whatever rate they like. Real people get hurt like this."

Libor is a benchmark for about $350 trillion of debt- related securities and derivatives, according to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. The rate that San Antonio-based AT&T Inc., the biggest U.S. phone company, pays on $2 billion of notes it sold on March 27 floats at three- month Libor plus 0.45 percentage point.

"Libor is baked into the global financial system," analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. led by Terry Belton, global head of fixed-income and foreign-exchange research, wrote in a May 16 report. "The question of whether a benchmark could be designed that is less flawed than Libor is debatable; whether such a benchmark could effectively replace Libor is not."

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