Search Results
Journal Article
Fed chair Bernanke on the lessons of SCAP \"Stress tests\"
At the Atlanta Fed's Financial Markets Conference, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke detailed how the federal banking supervisory agencies assessed the health of the nation's 19 largest banking companies.
Working Paper
The financial stress index: identification of systemic risk conditions
This paper develops a financial stress index for the United States, the Cleveland Financial Stress Index (CFSI), which provides a continuous signal of financial stress and broad coverage of the areas that could indicate it. The index is based on daily public-market data collected from four sectors of the fi nancial markets?the credit, foreign exchange, equity, and interbank markets. A dynamic weighting method is employed to capture changes in the relative importance of these four sectors as they occur. In addition, the design of the index allows the origin of the stress to be identified. We ...
Journal Article
Why Do Supervisors Rate Banking Organizations?
This article addresses a question that at first may appear simple: why do supervisors rate banking organizations? Prudential supervisors have a long-standing practice of confidentially rating the condition of the firms that they supervise. These ratings are used for a variety of purposes and can have important consequences. The authors analyze the history and evolution of this practice and consider how the use of ratings advances the statutory and regulatory goals of supervision of banking organizations. They conclude with a discussion of the implications for the design and implementation of ...
Journal Article
An international survey of stress tests
In the summer of 2000, central banks from the Group of Ten countries surveyed large international banks about their use of stress tests_a risk management tool that measures a firm's exposure to extreme movements in asset prices. The survey findings highlight the risks that most concern financial institutions and clarify how these institutions use stress tests in their overall risk management programs.
Report
The information value of the stress test and bank opacity
We investigate whether the ?stress test,? the extraordinary examination of the nineteen largest U.S. bank holding companies conducted by federal bank supervisors in 2009, produced the information demanded by the market. Using standard event study techniques, we find that the market had largely deciphered on its own which banks would have capital gaps before the stress test results were revealed, but that the market was informed by the size of the gap; given our proxy for the expected gap, banks with larger capital gaps experienced more negative abnormal returns. Our findings suggest that the ...
Journal Article
Assessing supervisory scenarios for interest rate risk
A new proposal by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision for setting the amount of capital banks must hold against potential losses from interest rate risk uses only a few, very stylized scenarios. Analysis shows the proposed scenarios are extremely unlikely to occur. While they may be appropriate for setting bank capital guidelines, they are much less relevant for everyday risk management. Instead, using a modeling framework with a plausible range of interest rate scenarios would be more relevant to help banks manage their interest rate risk.
Journal Article
Stress tests: useful complements to financial risk models
Many supervisory agencies have begun using stress-testing techniques to assess the capital adequacy of individual firms and even national financial systems. In this Economic Letter, I define stress testing, describe its possible applications, highlight certain techniques developed to conduct this testing, and survey its recent use by supervisory agencies.
Working Paper
Bank Risk-Taking and Monetary Policy Transmission: Evidence from China
We present evidence that monetary policy easing reduces bank risk-taking but exacerbates capital misallocation in China after implementing the Basel III capital regulationsin2013. Thenewregulationstightenedbankcapitalrequirementsandintroduced a new risk-weighting approach to calculating the capital adequacy ratio (CAR). To meet tightened capital requirements, a bank can boost its effective CAR by raising capital or by increasing the share of lending to low-risk borrowers. Using confidential loan-level data from a large Chinese commercial bank, merged with firm-level data on a large set of ...
Conference Paper
Long-run risks and equity Returns