Credit risk

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financial risk
Credit risk
Concentration risk
Market risk
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Settlement risk
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Basel II

Bank for International Settlements
Basel Accords - Basel I
Basel II

Background

Banking
Monetary policy - Central bank

Risk - Risk management

Regulatory capital
Tier 1 - Tier 2

Pillar 1: Regulatory Capital

Credit risk
Standardized - IRB Approach
F-IRB - A-IRB
PD - LGD - EAD

Operational risk
Basic - Standardized - AMA

Market risk
Duration - Value at risk

Pillar 2: Supervisory Review

Economic capital
Liquidity risk - Legal risk

Pillar 3: Market Disclosure

Disclosure

Business and Economics Portal

Credit risk is an investor's risk of loss arising from a borrower who does not make payments as promised[1]. Such an event is called a default. Other terms for credit risk are default risk and counterparty risk.

Investor losses include lost principal and interest, decreased cash flow, and increased collection costs, which arise in a number of circumstances[2]:

Contents

Types of credit risk

Credit risk can be classified in the following way:[3]

Assessing credit risk

Significant resources and sophisticated programs are used to analyze and manage risk[4]. Some companies run a credit risk department whose job is to assess the financial health of their customers, and extend credit (or not) accordingly. They may use in house programs to advise on avoiding, reducing and transferring risk. They also use third party provided intelligence. Companies like Standard & Poor's, Moody's Analytics, Fitch Ratings, and Dun and Bradstreet provide such information for a fee.

Most lenders employ their own models (credit scorecards) to rank potential and existing customers according to risk, and then apply appropriate strategies[5]. With products such as unsecured personal loans or mortgages, lenders charge a higher price for higher risk customers and vice versa[6][7]. With revolving products such as credit cards and overdrafts, risk is controlled through the setting of credit limits. Some products also require security, most commonly in the form of property.

Credit scoring models also form part of the framework used by banks or lending institutions grant credit to clients. For corporate and commercial borrowers, these models generally have qualitative and quantitative sections outlining various aspects of the risk including, but not limited to, operating experience, management expertise, asset quality, and leverage and liquidity ratios, respectively. Once this information has been fully reviewed by credit officers and credit committees, the lender provides the funds subject to the terms and conditions presented within the contract (as outlined above).

Credit risk has been shown to be particularly large and particularly damaging for very large investment projects, so-called megaprojects. This is because such projects are especially prone to end up in what has been called the "debt trap," i.e., a situation where – due to cost overruns, schedule delays, etc. – the costs of servicing debt becomes larger than the revenues available to pay interest on and bring down the debt.[8]

Sovereign risk

Sovereign risk is the risk of a government becoming unwilling or unable to meet its loan obligations, or reneging on loans it guarantees.[9] The existence of sovereign risk means that creditors should take a two-stage decision process when deciding to lend to a firm based in a foreign country. Firstly one should consider the sovereign risk quality of the country and then consider the firm's credit quality.[10]

Five macroeconomic variables that affect the probability of sovereign debt rescheduling are:[11]

The probability of rescheduling is an increasing function of debt service ratio, import ratio, variance of export revenue and domestic money supply growth. Frenkel, Karmann and Scholtens also argue that the likelihood of rescheduling is a decreasing function of investment ratio due to future economic productivity gains. Saunders argues that rescheduling can become more likely if the investment ratio rises as the foreign country could become less dependent on its external creditors and so be less concerned about receiving credit from these countries/investors.[12]

Counterparty risk

Counterparty risk, known as default risk, is the risk that an organization does not pay out on a bond, credit derivative, credit insurance contract, or other trade or transaction when it is supposed to.[13] Even organizations who think that they have hedged their bets by buying credit insurance of some sort still face the risk that the insurer will be unable to pay, either due to temporary liquidity issues or longer term systemic issues.[14]

Large insurers are counterparties to many transactions, and thus this is the kind of risk that prompts financial regulators to act, e.g., the bailout of insurer AIG.

On the methodological side, counterparty risk can be affected by wrong way risk, namely the risk that different risk factors be correlated in the most harmful direction. Including correlation between the portfolio risk factors and the counterparty default into the methodology is not trivial, see for example Brigo and Pallavicini.[15]

A good introduction can be found in a paper by Michael Pykhtin and Steven Zhu.[16]

Mitigating credit risk

Lenders mitigate credit risk using several methods:

Credit risk related acronyms

ACPM Active credit portfolio management

EAD Exposure at default

EL Expected loss

ERM Enterprise risk management

LGD Loss given default

PD Probability of default

KMV quantitative credit analysis solution acquired by credit rating agency Moody's[19]

PAR Portfolio at Risk

See also

Further reading

References

  1. ^ Item 2:Principles for the management of credit risk
  2. ^ Risk Glossary:Credit Risk
  3. ^ Credit Risk Classification
  4. ^ BIS Paper:Sound credit risk assessment and valuation for loans
  5. ^ Huang and Scott:Credit Risk Scorecard Design, Validation and User Acceptance
  6. ^ Investopedia:Risk-based mortgage pricing
  7. ^ Edelman:Risk based pricing for personal loans
  8. ^ Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius, and Werner Rothengatter, 2003, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge University Press).
  9. ^ Country Risk and Foreign Direct Investment. Duncan H. Meldrum (1999)
  10. ^ Cary L. Cooper, Derek F. Channon (1998). The Concise Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management. ISBN 978-0-631-20911-9. 
  11. ^ Frenkel, Karmann and Scholtens (2004). Sovereign Risk and Financial Crises. Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-22248-4. 
  12. ^ Cornett, Marcia Millon and Saunders, Anthony (2006). Financial Institutions Management: A Risk Management Approach, 5th Edition. McGraw Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-304667-9. 
  13. ^ Investopedia. Counterparty risk. Retrieved 2008-10-06
  14. ^ Tom Henderson. Counterparty Risk and the Subprime Fiasco. 2008-01-02. Retrieved 2008-10-06
  15. ^ Brigo, Damiano and Andrea Pallavicini (2007). Counterparty Risk under Correlation between Default and Interest Rates. In: Miller, J., Edelman, D., and Appleby, J. (Editors), Numerical Methods for Finance. Chapman Hall. ISBN 158488925X. Related SSRN Research Paper
  16. ^ A Guide to Modeling Counterparty Credit Risk, GARP Risk Review,July–August 2007 Related SSRN Research Paper
  17. ^ Debt covenants
  18. ^ MBA Mondays:Risk Diversification
  19. ^ On the equivalence of the KMV and maximum likelihood methods for structural credit risk models

External links