Credit and credibility

Credit risk modellers have made giant strides, but they still have to convince regulators that they can make the world a safer place. By Matthew Crabbe

Credit crisis? What credit crisis? “This cycle may appear more severe than the cycle of the early 1990s, but that is fundamentally because so many well-known names have fallen very hard and very publicly,” says Michael Ong, chief risk officer for the Americas at French bank Credit Agricole Indosuez.

The bigger issue, says Ong, is that risk managers failed to predict those record default rates, despite the preceding two-year slide in equity markets and the widespread use of credit risk models