We study the problem of a leveraged investor that is forced to unwind a significant fraction of its portfolio in a collection of illiquid markets. It is shown that markets may become disrupted in response to a relatively small liquidity shock. As a consequence, the probability of default can be...

Just over three years after enacting a Minimum Exchange Rate policy for the Swiss Franc vs. Euro (EUR/CHF), the Swiss National Bank (SNB) removed it in a surprise announcement on January 15, 2015. The announcement shocked the FX market — EUR/CHF dropped 25.5 percent in the minutes that...

The paper examines the investment activities of Swiss National Bank during last years and especially what is the nature of these activities, what is their scope, what are their financial grounds, what possible consequences could they lead to, and why are they so disconcerting for the financial...

We test whether the unconventional monetary policy (UMP) announcements by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank represent a risk factor for the hedge fund industry as a whole and for ten commonly used strategies in particular. Using modified event studies and Markov switching models,...