Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"The LIBOR is an interest rate. It's actually set in London; the 'L' stands for London. And it's an interest rate that banks charge each other for unsecured loans. The LIBOR spread is the difference between that LIBOR interest rate and the interest rate on a safe investment like a treasury security. So that spread represents the degree to which banks are willing to lend to each other, and if that spread gets big, it suggests there's a great deal of fear among banks, so much fear that they may not even be willing to lend to each other unless they get paid a very, very high interest rate. So analysts watch the LIBOR spread as an indicator of, again, fear in the financial markets and the degree to which the financial markets are freezing up. And so in October of this year, what we saw and what concerned the administration, the Federal Reserve, was that the LIBOR spread rose to an historic high. We had never seen it that high. And that was indicative of the fact that the financial markets were not functioning. Banks were not even willing to lend to each other, let alone to customers. And so that was the stimulus, if you will, to prompt the administration to ask for the $700 billion rescue plan for the financial markets. Now since then, since October, the good news is the LIBOR spread has come down, but it's still not back to normal levels, so this is suggesting that, yes, the financial markets have improved, but they are not yet normal."