In regulating the market risk exposure of banks, the approach taken to date is (in either the Standard or the Value-at-Risk methodology) to use a 'hard-link' regime that sets a fixed relation between exposure and capital requirement exogenously. A new 'Pre-commitment' approach (PCA) proposes the...

Traditionally, regulation of banks has focused on the riskentailed in bank loans. Loans are typically nontradedassets. In recent years, another component of bank assetshas become increasingly important: assets actively tradedin the financial markets.1 These assets form the “tradingbook” of a...

This paper studies the role of diversification in reducing the volatility of corporate bond returns induced by changes in credit spreads. Specifically, it looks at how credit risk can be diminished when a portfolio is diversified across countries, industry sectors, maturities, seniority types...

The distribution of ratings changes plays a crucial role in many credit risk models. As is well known, these distributions vary across time and different issuer types. Ignoring such dependencies may lead to inaccurate assessments of credit risk. In this paper, a quantification is provided of the...

Banks have recently developed new techniques for gauging the credit risk associated with portfolios of illiquid, defaultable instruments. These techniques could revolutionise banks' management of credit risk and could in the longer term serve as a more risk-sensitive basis for calculating...