It's a tongue in cheek article in the NY Times. NY has a lot of finance folks. To a lot of finance folks, libor has been a meaningful number for a long time and

It's a tongue in cheek article in the NY Times. NY has a lot of finance folks. To a lot of finance folks, libor has been a meaningful number for a long time and a million contracts are based on it. As for "treating it as a human", the financial industry has long used the term "mr market". Ie it's sort of an inside joke. To the target audience it is not an awful title, nor an awful article. As for the semantics of numbers v rates - the rate is specified in numbers. And LIBOR v Libor - the number was used so extensively for so long many people didn't even know what the acronym meant. It's like correcting someone for calling a tissue a kleenex.