Measuring Integrated Market and Credit Risks in Bank Portfolios - An Application to a Set of Hypothetical Banks Operation in South Africa (Electronic book text)

The banking literature and practice have devoted a considerable amount of work to study bank risk. From the standard probit/logit analysis to the more sophisticated VaR models, most of the effort has been addressed to the identification of the sources of vulnerability, to the assessment of the probability of scenarios of financial distress and, more recently, to the measurement of market risk. The banking crises that developed in the late 90's in many emerging markets have brought a new emphasis to the issue and have reminded us of the importance of credit risk. They also created a need to examine the connections between the financial environment and the potential losses faced by financial institutions due to client defaults or downgradings. For example, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan recently noted that ..".the present practice of modeling market risk separately from credit risk, a simplification made for expediency, is certainly questionable in times of extraordinary market stress. Under extreme conditions, discontinuous jumps in market valuations raise the specter of insolvency, and market risk becomes indistinct from credit risk.2&#x201D