Archive for the ‘international markets’ Category
When a credit calls for assistance
Wednesday, March 24, 2010 20:03 Comments OffThe independent system of doing business no longer works. Today the workplace rallying cry is teamwork. Organizations are becoming interdependent and relying on others to help them accomplish their goals. They’re moving toward more openness and creating organizational cultures that support it. The Partnership Continuum model helps partners assess where they are in this transition. [...]
Why credit risk is something to bear in mind
Saturday, January 2, 2010 18:38 Comments OffThe asymmetric distribution of corporate bond returns is easily explained by the Merton model introduced earlier. Numerous studies substantiate that even the return distributions of less risky and more liquid asset classes like government bonds are skewed and leptokurtic. Moreover, index returns exhibit significant autocorrelation that can be explained partially by a permanent component. Basically, [...]
Small changes in credit quality
Saturday, December 5, 2009 16:45 Comments OffMean–variance analysis, made popular by Markowitz and Sharpe, has been the basis for the process of portfolio optimization since the 1990s. Yet, the method itself suffers from various pitfalls. Among others it ignores deviations of the return distributions from normality. The asymmetric risk profile of corporate bonds and the illiquidity of certain segments of the [...]
Indicators for the overall level of credit leverage
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 22:08 Comments OffHaving focused on indicators for the overall level of leverage so far, we will now switch to metrics that relate the ability to generate cash flows and profits to the interest burden. This helps to better capture liquidity problems in the short term, but goes at the expense of understanding the longer term vulnerability of [...]
The nominal level of debt
Sunday, October 18, 2009 15:57 Comments OffGenerally, in growing economies the nominal level of debt rises over the years. This is mostly because of inflation and a steady growth in balance sheets. The long-term upward trend has accelerated sharply since 1980, coinciding with the sustained fall in short- and long-term interest rates and inflation rates. Since then, the steadily falling level [...]
The role of employment in credit
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 8:23 Comments OffFor decades economists have analyzed the behavior of various economic indicators during the business cycle. Employment is commonly seen as one of the lagging indicators for the state of the economy. However, there is a leading indicator for the labor sector that coincides with changes in credit spreads. For example, for most of the time [...]