Search Results
Working Paper
Benchmarking Operational Risk Stress Testing Models
The Federal Reserve?s Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) requires large bank holding companies (BHCs) to project losses under stress scenarios. In this paper, we propose multiple benchmarks for operational loss projections and document the industry distribution relative to these benchmarks. The proposed benchmarks link BHCs? loss projections with both financial characteristics and metrics of historical loss experience. These benchmarks capture different measures of exposure and together provide a comprehensive view of the reasonability of model outcomes. Furthermore, we employ ...
Discussion Paper
Are BHC and Federal Reserve Stress Test Results Converging? What Do We Learn from 2015?
In March, the Federal Reserve and thirty-one large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) announced results of the latest Dodd-Frank Act-mandated stress tests. Some commentators have argued that BHCs, in designing their stress test models, have strong incentives to mimic the Fed’s stress test results, since the Fed’s results are an integral part of the Federal Reserve’s supervisory assessment of capital adequacy for these firms. In this post, we look at the 2015 stress test projections by the eighteen largest U.S. BHCs and by the Fed and compare them to similar numbers from 2013 and 2014. ...
Working Paper
Stress Testing Household Debt
We estimate a county-level model of household delinquency and use it to conduct "stress tests" of household debt. Applying house price and unemployment rate shocks from Comprehensive Capital Analysis Review (CCAR) stress tests, we find that forecasted delinquency rates for the recent stock of debt are moderately lower than for the stock of debt before the 2007-09 financial crisis, given the same set of shocks. This decline in expected delinquency rates under stress reflects an improvement in debt-to-income ratios and an increase in the share of debt held by borrowers with relatively high ...
Speech
Economic research and stress testing
Remarks at the Fourth Annual Stress Test Modeling Symposium, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston, Massachusetts.
Report
Assessing financial stability: the Capital and Loss Assessment under Stress Scenarios (CLASS) model
The CLASS model is a top-down capital stress testing framework that uses public data, simple econometric models, and auxiliary assumptions to project the effect of macroeconomic scenarios on U.S. banking firms. Through the lens of the model, we find that the total banking system capital shortfall under stressful macroeconomic conditions began to rise four years before the financial crisis, peaking in the fourth quarter of 2008. The capital gap has since fallen sharply, and is now significantly below pre-crisis levels. In the cross section, banking firms estimated to be most sensitive to ...
Discussion Paper
The CLASS Model: A Top-Down Assessment of the U.S. Banking System
Central banks and bank supervisors have increasingly relied on capital stress testing as a supervisory and macroprudential tool. Stress tests have been used by central banks and supervisors to assess the resilience of individual banking companies to adverse macroeconomic and financial market conditions as a way of gauging additional capital needs at individual firms and as a means of assessing the overall capital strength of the banking system. In this post, we describe a framework for assessing the impact of various macroeconomic scenarios on the capital and performance of the U.S. banking ...
Journal Article
“Stress Testing” Banks on Commercial Real Estate
Recent research tests the effects of a large (hypothetical) drop in commercial real estate prices: Banks most affected would be small and the resulting noncompliance would apply to a small fraction of assets in the US banking system.
Working Paper
Enhancing Stress Tests by Adding Macroprudential Elements
The use of stress testing for macroprudential objectives is advanced by modeling spillovers within the financial sector or between the real and financial sectors. In this chapter, we discuss several macroprudential elements that capture these spillovers and how they might be added to stress test frameworks. We show how funding spillovers can be modeled as an add-on, using a reduced-form relation between banks' funding cost, bank capital and economic activity. Using a calibration to US data, we project very modest funding spillovers conditional on the DFAST 2018 severely adverse scenario. ...
Working Paper
Enhancing prudential standards in financial regulations
The financial crisis has generated fundamental reforms in the financial regulatory system in the U.S. and internationally. Much of this reform was in direct response to the weaknesses revealed in the precrisis system. The new ?macroprudential? approach to financial regulations focuses on risks arising in financial markets broadly, as well as the potential impact on the financial system that may arise from financial distress at systemically important financial institutions. Systemic risk is the key factor in financial stability, but our current understanding of systemic risk is rather limited. ...
Working Paper
Primer on the Forward-Looking Analysis of Risk Events (FLARE) Model: A Top-Down Stress Test Model
This technical note describes the Forward-Looking Analysis of Risk Events (FLARE) model, which is a top-down model that helps assess how well the banking system is positioned to weather exogenous macroeconomic shocks. FLARE estimates banking system capital under varying macroeconomic scenarios, time horizons, and other systemic shocks.