Getting and plotting LIBOR in R

LIBOR

London InterBank Offered Rate is considered as an important metric in the interest rate for a long time. Some financial analysts use it as a risk-free rate as the banks lend the money to one another at this rate. (Hot money) Some financial organization uses this rate as a basis to enter into the swap deal with its counter party. (i.e., LIBOR + 2%) It also indicates how much money is flowing today. Along with T-bill, it's the most important metric in finance society.

I'll get the rate from bankrate.com

Please, understand that I used external library. Make sure that you install "XML" package with the instruction
install.packages("XML")
first. if you don't install XML package, which allows you to extract the tables from web site, please install it first.

Here's the source code.

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#You need to install "XML" package first.
#If you don't have it, please execute install.packages("XML") first.
library("XML")
libor_temp <- readHTMLTable("http://www.bankrate.com/rates/interest-rates/libor.aspx")
#This is a list type. List includes any data type. That's why we use double bracket [[]]
libor_temp <- libor_temp[[1]]
period_temp <- c("1 month", "3 month", "6 month", "1 year")

#As the type of these data is factor(Class), we need to convert this to numeric type
#Direct conversion doesn't work as it interpret each class into just single number
libor_temp <- as.character(libor_temp$`This week`)
libor_temp <- as.numeric(libor_temp)

#The web site contains a lot of informations. All we need is just Libor
libor_temp <- c(libor_temp[3], libor_temp[4], libor_temp[5], libor_temp[7])
libor <- data.frame(period=period_temp, libor=libor_temp)

x <- c(1,3,6,12)
y <- libor$libor

#xlab => Label for X-axis
#ylab => Label for Y-axis
#ylim => The range on Y-axis

plot(x,y,xlab = "Month", ylab="Libor Rate (%)", ylim=c(0,max(libor$libor)))
lines(x,y)

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