Modelling
Credit tails
Model Risk
Spreadsheets: a tool you can trust?
For more than two decades, spreadsheets have been the tool of choice for financial services firms. But do they contain hidden dangers? Dianne See Morrison reports
Time for multi-period capital models
Several financial institutions use single-period models to determine their credit portfolio loss distribution, calculate their loss volatility and assign economic capital.
Spring loading
Natural Gas
Generalising universal performance measures
Performance and risk measurement are fundamental quantitative activities in finance, andnew ways of measuring them are always of interest. A recently proposed procedure is theuniversal performance measure. Theofanis Darsinos and Stephen Satchell show…
The score for credit
Jorge Sobehart and Sean Keenan discuss the benefits and limitations of model performance measures for default and credit spread prediction, and highlight several common pitfalls in the model comparison found in the literature and vendor documentation. To…
Operational risk versus credit risk: Similarities and differences
Many attempts have been made to adapt credit risk models to quantify operational risk. In this article, Gerrit Jan van den Brink of Dresdner Bank and KPMG's Thomas Kaiser compare op risk and specific credit risk models in terms of input data, methodology…
Basel I must be made more risk-sensitive for general banks, say Independent Community Bankers
The 1988 Basel Accord, also known as Basel I, must be improved to be more risk-sensitive for the benefit of community banks, said the Independent Community Bankers Association (ICBA), the Washington, DC-based membership organisation of 5,000 community…
The ultimate stress-test: modelling the next liquidity crisis
What would happen if one of the world's largest investment banks pulled out of derivatives? Risk managers at Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase are already building this scenario into their stress-tests, and regulators want other banks to do the same.
Accord preparations: the rest is yet to come
While the debates have raged for months about many aspects of the proposed Basel II Accord, on some points there has been relative silence, in particular with regard to the seeming overreliance on statistical techniques.
Bank risk disclosure improving, says Basel Committee
A new report from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision says that, overall, banks are improving their disclosure of credit, market, operational and other risks in their annual reports.
Models of good behaviour
The development of new models that describe the real dynamics of energy prices have to take into account the behavioural aspects of market players. The problem is how to quantify these aspects. Maria Kielmas reports
Associations send repo VAR protest to Basel Committee
US and UK industry associations have sent a joint letter to the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision expressing their "disappointment" that the multipliers for portfolio value-at-risk modelling of repo counterparty exposure will not be altered in the…
Asian basket spreads and other exotic averaging options
Giuseppe Castellacci and Michael Siclari of OpenLink introduce a class of exotic options that simultaneously generalises both Asian and basket options. They develop approximate analytic models for real-time pricing of complex instruments that average…
A decision model for selling park and loan services
The park and loan model is useful for gas storages and pipelines. The concept can be applied to many ‘when to sell’-type decisions. Here, Huagang ‘Hugh’ Li considers selling park and loan services as a financial and statistical decision on revenue and…
UK banking bodies expect further revisions to Basel II op risk plans
British banking industry bodies said in December they continue to expect that the operational risk aspects of the proposed Basel II bank safety accord will be revised in the light of banking industry experience.
Enterprise-wide risk management: Knitting together bank risks
Thanks to recent events, bank risk managers are placing more emphasis on integrating counterparty and credit risk into other portions of their enterprise-wide risk management systems.
Minimising extremes
Portfolio diversification often breaks down in stressed market environments, but the co-movement of asset prices in a tail risk regime may be modelled using a coefficient of tail dependence. Here, Yannick Malevergne and Didier Sornette show how such…
Sponsor's article > Basel II and pro-cyclicality
The main argument for making regulatory capital requirements more risk-sensitive is to improve allocational efficiency. But this may lead to intensified business cycles if regulators fail to take measures to prevent such an impact.
Modelling default rate dynamics in the CreditRisk+ framework
Credit portfolio risk