The credit business is an essential part of each banks' activities. With regard to the increasing regulatory obligations, the risk management and the associated minimum capital requirements gain in importance. Banks have got the possibility to determine their credit risk by an internal rating...

Being able to model yield curves from observed bond yields is essential in capital markets. Yield curves are required to accurately price financial products as well as to correctly assess the macroeconomic situation of economies. Current models based on the work of Nelson/Siegel et al. apply a...

Trading and investment strategies play an essential part in better understanding fixed income markets. Over-the-counter markets and thousands of different outstanding bonds increase the difficulties to identify adequate comparison methods. Market participants and their practices differ widely...

Market risk management is one of the key factors to success in managing financial institutions. Underestimated risk can have desastrous consequences for individual companies and even whole economies, not least as could be seen during the recent crises. Overestimated risk, on the other side, may...

The Basel III framework represents the response to the regulation deficits of the financial cri-sis and the immense losses of many banks in years 2007/2008. The aim of the framework is to increase the level of capital in financial institutions and to improve the loss absorption and risk coverage...

In almost every financial market crisis we can observe widening credit spreads, especially in the last years during the subprime and sovereign debt crisis. But what exactly drives the credit spread? This paper will outline static components, i.e. default risk, liquidity, risk and the relative...

Most traditional Value at Risk models neglect market liquidity risk and hence only consider the market price risk (i.e. risk associated with holding a certain position). In order to fully capture the market risk associated to holding and trading a position, we first define market liquidity risk,...

The credit crisis and the following sovereign debt crisis during 2007 and 2012 led to an increasing volatility of European corporate bond credit spreads. European investment grade credit spreads rose in 2007 and 2008 from 50 BP to over 350 BP. In the years after the credit spreads declined to...

The globalisation on financial markets and the development of financial derivatives has increased not only chances but also potential risk within the banking industry. Especially market risk has gained major significance since market price variation of interest rates, stocks or exchange rates...

Credit risk measurement and management become more important in all financial institutions in the light of the current financial crisis and the global recession. This particularly applies to most of the complex structured financing forms whose risk cannot be quantified with com-mon rating...