8008 Exam Dumps - PRM Certification - Exam III: Risk Management Frameworks, Operational Risk, Credit Risk, Counterparty Risk, Market Risk, ALM, FTP - 2015 Edition

A LIBOR based loan requires cash to move from the lender to the borrower in the amount of the notional. The Overnight Index Swap requires only the exchange of interest payments, and therefore represents less risk.

Therefore the LIBOR based loan is a riskier exposure.

The LIBOR is generally higher than the OIS. In fact, the difference between the two, the LIBOR-OIS spread, is a standard measure of the risk premium in the market that goes up when the risk of default by counterparty banks is considered high. This is because when the market perceives the risk of default to be high, the participants need a risk premium to take on the default risk which is considerably lesser with the OIS.

The correct answer is choice 'a'

Recall the following summary of the GARCH model. The long term variance in a GARCH model is given by ω/(1 - α - β). In this case, this works out to =SQRT(0.001/(1 - 0.05 - 0.93)) * SQRT(250) = 3.54%. Yesterday's volatility of 1% is irrelevant to the question.

In the February of 2009, the Federal Reserve (which is the US central bank system) and other US banking regulators embarked on a simultaneous assessment of the capital held by the 19 largest US bank holding companies. This was an unprecedented exercise of a kind never undertaken before, and was known as the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP). The purpose of the exercise was to determine the amount of additional capital (called the 'capital buffer') each of the institutions covered would need to ensure that it would have sufficient capital if the economy weakened more than was then expected. The idea was that these financial institutions would then raise additional capital equal to their respective capital buffers by the fourth quarter of 2009.

Statement I is false on two counts: firstl the SCAP was conducted by the US central bank and other regulators, and not the 'Treasury Department' (the Treasury Department in the US is the equivalent of the Ministry of Finance in may other countries). Second, the SCAP was a one time exercise, and not annual.

Statement II is correct. The regulators prescribed rates of losses on credit assets of different kinds and other macro-economic assumptions, and asked the banks to determine the extent of losses they would need to bear (in addition to calculating them independently too). Therefore the SCAP was a stress test where the scenario was prescribed by the regulators.

Statement III is false. Capital buffer under the SCAP referred to the additional capital the banks would need to have certain ratios of capital, and not 'excess' capital.

Statement IV is correct. The SCAP envisaged two capital targets: a Tier 1 capital ratio in excess of 6% at the end of 2010; and a Tier 1 common capital ratio in excess of 4%. Therefore both the total Tier 1 capital and Tier 1 common capital were targeted.

Therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer.

Choice 'd' is the correct answer. Settlement risk, as the name suggests, arises upon settlement when one of the parties delivers its obligation under the transaction and the other does not. Consider a EUR/USD FX forward contract maturing in a month. At maturity, one of the parties will deliver EURs and the other USDs. If one party fails to deliver, then it constitutes a very large risk to the other party. This risk is much larger than pre-settlement risk, because the amount at risk is the entire notional and not just the replacement value. Of course, settlement risk exists for a very short period of time, no more than a number or hours or a day.

There is no such thing as 'replacement risk', and credit risk is a larger category of which settlement risks is one component. Settlement risk is the most appropriate answer.

CreditRisk+ treats default as a binary event, ignoring downgrade risk, capital structures of individual firms in the portfolio or the causes of default. It uses a single parameter, λ or the mean default rate, and derives credit risk based upon the Poisson distribution. Therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer.

This question is different in that it uses terminology you will not find in the PRMIA handbook. Yet it is important to understand these as there may be a question based on this slightly different terminology. (It is only the terminology that is different, the concepts are the same.)

If you read the PRMIA handbook, there are three methods of calculating VaR: Analytical or parametric, historical simulation and Monte Carlo simulations. There is one more way of categorizing the methods of calculating VaR, and these are as follows:

1. Local valuation: This refers to analytical or parametric VaR. This relies upon a neat statistical formula to calculate VaR and assumes a normal distribution. It also relies upon a known covariance matrix between the different components of VaR. Local valuation based VaR is further subdivided into two types:

a. Linear VaR: Linear VaR is calculated assuming the portfolio is linear, and its value changes just based upon the delta of the portfolio. In such cases, once a change (eg, in stock values) is known, that change is multiplied by the delta alone to get the VaR. Second order effects, such as gamma or convexity are ignored.

b. Non-linear VaR: Non linear analytical VaR is calculated using both delta and the second derivative, ie gamma or the convexity. This is more accurate if the portfolio is non-linear.

The key thing about 'local revaluation' VaR is that it does not require us to reprice or completely value all instruments in the portfolio. All we have to know is the delta (or the gamma and convexity as well) and multiply that with the number of standard deviations of change in the risk factor that we are interested in. So if we are considering a bond, we don't have to recalculate the new value of the bond as we can just use the delta. This can be a significant computational advantage for a large financial institution where there may be a large number of positions.

2. Full revaluation: This refers to a VaR method where the asset in question is fully repriced based on the new value of the risk factor - and this includes both historical and Monte Carlo based VaR methods.

Local revaluation, or analytical method based VaR is computationally easier to calculate, specially if based on just the delta-normal method (ie ignoring second order effects from convexity or gamma). But it will give incorrect results if the portfolio includes substantial non-linearity or other complexities. The full revaluation methods will always give the correct results, but they can be computationally difficult to arrive at.

Statement I is completely inaccurate - local revaluation methods do take correlations into account through the correlation or covariance matrices. Statement IV is false too - the 'delta normal' VaR refers to Var calculations based upon just the delta and do not account for the convexity or optionality. Statements II and III are correct. Therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer.

Normal mixtures address fat or heavy tails, not volatility clustering. Therefore statement I is not correct.

Statement II is not correct. Where VaR is calculated at low levels of confidence, VaR based on normal mixtures may be lower than that under a normal assumption. This is no different than for other fat tailed distributions.

Statement III is correct. In situations where multiple market scenarios can unfold with a given probability, and each scenario is normal, we can express the result with a normal mixture where the underlying normal distributions have the probabilities of the different scenarios.

It is the cross-default clauses in debt agreements that generally provide that a default on one obligation is considered a credit event applying to all debts of the obligor, and therefore we are able to deal with credit risk at the borrower level, and not at the level of the individual security. It also helps avoid situations where borrowers can selectively default on some obligations while continuing to service others. Therefore Choice 'a' is the correct answer. The other choices are incorrect.