The end of the monoline?

Fears that monoline bond insurers would lose their triple-A ratings rocked global capital markets in February. As bankers, regulators and industry chiefs gawp at the cracks in the insurers' foundations, Daniel Andrews investigates where it all went wrong for the protection business

The fear factor is very high and does not look like receding," says one managing director at a rating agency in New York. "Go back to the summer and people thought they had a handle on the implications of subprime only for conduits and structured investment vehicles to get into trouble. Now there is a question mark hanging over bond and mortgage insurers. The foundations of protection are rocking."

For those asleep at their Bloomberg screens for the past five months, monoline insurers guarantee

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Credit risk & modelling – Special report 2021

This Risk special report provides an insight on the challenges facing banks in measuring and mitigating credit risk in the current environment, and the strategies they are deploying to adapt to a more stringent regulatory approach.

The wild world of credit models

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced a kind of schizophrenia in loan-loss models. When the pandemic hit, banks overprovisioned for credit losses on the assumption that the economy would head south. But when government stimulus packages put wads of cash in…

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