Miguel A. Segoviano Basurto

Sovereign Spreads; Global Risk Aversion, Contagion or Fundamentals?

Over the past year, euro area sovereign spreads have exhibited an unprecedented degree of volatility. This paper explores how much of these large movements reflected shifts in (i) global risk aversion (ii) country-specific risks, directly from worsening fundamentals, or indirectly from spillovers originating in other sovereigns. The analysis shows that earlier in the crisis, the surge in global risk aversion was a significant factor influencing sovereign spreads, while recently country-specific factors have started playing a more important role. The perceived source of contagion itself has changed: previously, it could be found among those sovereigns hit hard by the financial crisis, such as Austria, the Netherlands, and Ireland, whereas lately the countries putting pressure on euro area government bonds have been primarily Greece, Portugal, and Spain, as the emphasis has shifted towards short-term refinancing risk and long-term fiscal sustainability. The paper concludes that debt sustainability and appropriate management of sovereign balance sheets are necessary conditions for preventing sovereign risk from feeding back into broader financial stability concerns.

Default, Credit Growth, and Asset Prices

This paper uses a Merton-type estimate of the probability of default (PoD) for the main banks in a sample of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and middle-income countries as a proxy for the fragility of their banking systems. Based on theory and stylized facts, the paper explores a range of financial and real variables that explain such PoDs across time. We find property price fluctuations and bank credit to be important explanatory factors. There is two-way interaction between these variables and a clearer relationship when the variables are entered as a deviation from trend. The lag structure between such developments and PoDs is long and varies widely across countries. The paper assesses the implications of these findings for economic policy.

Portfolio Credit Risk and Macroeconomic Shocks: Applications to Stress Testing Under Data-Restricted Environments

Portfolio credit risk measurement is greatly affected by data constraints, especially when focusing on loans given to unlisted firms. Standard methodologies adopt convenient, but not necessarily properly specified parametric distributions or simply ignore the effects of macroeconomic shocks on credit risk. Aiming to improve the measurement of portfolio credit risk, we propose the joint implementation of two new methodologies, namely the conditional probability of default (CoPoD) methodology and the consistent information multivariate density optimizing (CIMDO) methodology. CoPoD incorporates the effects of macroeconomic shocks into credit risk, recovering robust estimators when only short time series of loans exist. CIMDO recovers portfolio multivariate distributions (on which portfolio credit risk measurement relies) with improved specifications, when only partial information about borrowers is available. Implementation is straightforward and can be very useful in stress testing exercises (STEs), as illustrated by the STE carried out within the Danish Financial Sector Assessment Program.

Securitization : The Road Ahead

The discussion in this note seeks to preserve the beneficial features of securitization while mitigating those that may pose risks to financial stability. A comprehensive set of reforms—targeting both supply- and demand-side inefficiencies—will be needed to put securitization back on a sound, growth-supportive footing. The note departs from others in proposing a broad suite of principles applicable to various elements of the financial intermediation chain. After indentifying where policy makers have already made progress, we then propose measures to address remaining impediments to the rehabilitation of securitization markets. We also encourage more consistent industry standards for the classification of risk (albeit applied at a granular rather than overarching level). Finally, we introduce various initiatives that could aid in fostering the development of a diversified non-bank investor base for securitization in Europe.

Securitization: Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead

This paper examines the financial stability implications arising from securitization markets, with one eye on the past and another on the future. The paper begins by deriving a number of “lessons learned” based on an examination of key industry developments in the years before the crisis. Emphasis is placed on the various ways in which securitization markets dramatically changed shape in the years preceding the crisis, vis-a-vis their earlier (simpler) incarnation. Current impediments to securitization markets are then discussed, including a treatment of various regulatory initiatives, the operational infrastructure of securitization markets, and related official sector intervention. Finally, a broad suite of policy recommendations is presented to address the factors that either contributed to the crisis or may currently be posing obstacles to growth-supportive, sustainable securitization markets. These proposals are guided by the objective of preserving the beneficial features of securitization, while mitigating those that pose a potential risk to financial stability.

Optimal Bank Recovery

Banks’ living wills involve both recovery and resolution. Since it may not always be clear when recovery plans or actions should be triggered, there is a role for an objective metric to trigger recovery. We outline how such a metric could be constructed meeting criteria of (i) adequate loss absorption; (ii) distinguishing between weak and sound banks; (iii) little susceptibility to manipulation; (iv) timeliness; (v) scalable from the individual bank to the system. We show how this would have worked in the U.K., during 2007–11. This approach has the added advantage that it could be extended to encompass a whole ladder of sanctions of increasing severity as capital erodes.

A Comprehensive Multi-Sector Tool for Analysis of Systemic Risk and Interconnectedness (SyRIN)

This paper presents the Systemic Risk and Interconnectedness (SyRIN) tool. SyRIN allows a comprehensive assessment of systemic risk via quantification of the impact of risk amplification mechanisms, due to interconnectedness structures across banks and other financial intermediaries—insurance, pension fund, hedge fund and investment fund sectors, which cannot be captured when analyzing sectors independently. The tool produces various metrics to evaluate systemic risk from complementary perspectives, including tail risk, cross-entity interconnectedness and the contribution to systemic risk by different entities and sectors. SyRIN is easily implementable with publicly available data and can be adapted to cater to different degrees of institutional granularity and data availability. The framework is designed to be a tool to identify vulnerabilities from a top-down perspective that can lead to deeper analysis in specific sectors for policy formulation.