Hello and welcome to a new series of more or less, a statistical rainbow amidst a downport

of dubious numbers.

This week we'll set off in search of a million starving children, not in Chad, Marley or

South Sudan, but says an influential charity here in Britain, and will introduce a new

feature with TV's Jan Wong.

But one number story has been dominating the dance floor of news this summer, and it's

still going strong.

You probably know the following facts, LIBOR is a financial number.

It's important, and Barclays Bank has been fiddling it and has been fined $450 million

for doing so.

But judging from your emails, you want us to go a little deeper than that.

In fact, this isn't the first time that more or less has wrestled with the mighty LIBOR.

Back in late 2008, as the world was still reeling from the collapse of Lehman Brothers,

some people were calling LIBOR the most important number in the world.

The LIBOR numbers, actually there are many of them, in different currencies and for short,

medium and long-term loans, are benchmarks for all sorts of interest rates and other financial

contracts.

They were also a measure of how much trouble the banking system was in, and it was in

this fee-brile atmosphere that more or less talked its way into the office in London's

Canary Wharf, where LIBOR is calculated every morning.

We were the first journalists to do so.

We've just walked into the Thompson Reuters offices, which is the front end of the operation

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