Nearly every credit card on the market today is a variable rate card.
Energy suppliers will also have to offer customers their lowest variable rate tariff by default.
Meanwhile, Westpac's variable rate is around 5.86% per annum, while its fixed rates are also above 5%.
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All were former Abbey customers, who were put on standard variable rate (SVR) mortgages after coming off fixed-rate deals.
Current borrowers revert to a standard variable rate (SVR) of just 2% above bank rate, so currently paying 2.5%.
Such swaps had the university paying a fixed rate to, and simultaneously receiving a variable rate from, a counterparty.
The original motion called for the the prompt re-establishment of the democratically endorsed Scottish variable rate of income tax.
According to its 2011 annual report, Ameresco finances some of its landfill gas projects with variable rate bank loans.
Trading Direct, for instance, lends investors who are willing to assume a heavy debt load at a variable rate of 1.25 percent.
So should you go for the variable rate, hoping for the best?
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The variable rate is keyed to the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor).
The lender said its standard variable rate (SVR) would be cut by 0.15 of a percentage point to 7.34% from 1 November for existing borrowers.
Variable rate bonds should be looking pretty attractive at this point.
Lenders' standard variable rate (SVR) deals are tending to be more attractive than new fixed-rate deals for owners, with interest rates having plunged in recent months.
The US government has then traded a fixed rate of 0.57 for a bet on the variable rate of US T-Bills over the the next 10 years.
And the way the program works now, before these changes go into effect, is that the loan program has a variable rate with a cap of 8.25 percent.
Yes, says Strathclyde's Mr Hughes Hallett, but the stock of existing home loans (as opposed to the flow of new ones) is still mostly at a variable rate.
The lender are charging me their highest standard variable rate.
These hedges effectively convert these variable rate bank loans into fixed rate loans, better matching the interest expense from the loans to the income from the landfill gas projects they finance.
Mark Harris, chief executive of mortgage broker SPF Private Clients, explained that most mortgages track a lender's standard variable rate, or the base rate, so most are not directly affected by Libor.
The Bank of England's figures show that as of last November, the average credit card interest rate was 15.89%, while the average interest rate for a standard variable rate mortgage was just 3.98%.
The Bank of England's base rate is still at a record low of 0.5% and many variable rate savings polices on offer from banks and building societies offer less than 1% to their savers.
Earlier, in October 2008, the bank had written to some Halifax customers, telling them it would raise the standard variable rate (SVR) 'cap' on their mortgages from 2% above the Bank Rate to 3% above it.
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This is where a borrower can get a lower fixed rate, say 5.5% for five years (the bait), but is then locked in (or "hooked") for another two or three years on a higher, variable rate.
If you go for a variable rate mini-cash Isa you should bear in mind that some product providers have been know to offer a very attractive rate to tempt new customers but then reduce the return at a later date.
With the majority of CDOs being backed by mortgages, the principal-only tranche has a known future cash flow, but at a variable rate of return, while the interest-only tranche has both an unknown cash flow and an unknown rate of return on that cash flow.
"These mistakes stemmed from the fact that Bank of Scotland had an inadequate mortgage records system meaning they could not identify which of those 250, 000 customers were subject to a cap on their standard variable rate, " said Tracey McDermott, the FSA's director of enforcement and financial crime.
BBC: Bank of Scotland fined ?4.2m over Halifax mortgage errors
Meanwhile, Government-owned Northern Rock cut its Standard Variable Rate by 0.1% on Monday, its first move after the Bank of England cut base rates by 0.25% 11 days ago, and more than a week after the chancellor said banks should pass on interest rate cuts to homeowners.
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