Pass the PRMIA PRM 8008 Questions and answers with ValidTests

The CCAR is a supervisory mechanism adopted by the US Federal Reserve Bank to assess capital adequacy for bank holding companies it supervises. It was not a concept introduced by the international Basel framework.

The other three were indeed rules introduced by Basel 2.5, which was ultimately subsumed into Basel III.

Stressed VaR is just the standard 99%/10 day VaR, calculated with the assumption that relevant market factors are under stress.

The Incremental Risk Charge (IRC) is an estimate of default and migration risk of unsecuritized credit products in the

trading book. (Though this may sound like a credit risk term, it relates to market risk - for example, a bond rated A being downgraded to BBB. In the old days, the banking book where loans to customers are held was the primary source of credit risk, but with OTC trading and complex products the trading book also now holds a good deal of credit risk. Both IRC and CRM account for these.)

While IRC considers only non-securitized products, the CRM (Comprehensive Risk Model) considers securitized products such as tranches, CDOs, and correlation based instruments.

The IRC, SVaR and CRM complement standard VaR by covering risks that are not included in a standard VaR model. Their results are therefore added to the VaR for capital adequacy determination.

The actuarial model considers defaults to follow a Poisson distribution with a given mean per period, and these are binary in nature, ie a default happens or it does not happen. The model does not consider the loss of value from credit downgrades, and focuses only on defaults. The model also does not consider default correlations between obligors. Therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer.

The other choices are not true statements that would apply to the actuarial approach.

High frequency and low severity risks, for example the risks of fraud losses for a credit card issuer, may have high expected losses, but low unexpected losses. In other words, we can generally expect these losses to stay within a small expected and known range. The capital requirement will be the worst case losses at a given confidence level less expected losses, and in such cases this can be expected to be low.

On the other hand, medium severity medium frequency risks, such as the risks of unexpected legal claims, 'fat-finger' trading errors, will have low expected losses but a high level of unexpected losses. Thus the capital requirement for such risks will be high.

It is also worthwhile mentioning high severity and low frequency risks - for example a rogue trader circumventing all controls and bringing the bank down, or a terrorist strike or natural disaster creating other losses - will probably have zero expected losses & high unexpected losses but only at very high levels of confidence. In other words, operational risk capital is unlikely to provide for such events and these would lie in the part of the tail that is not covered by most levels of confidence when calculating operational risk capital.

Note that risk capital is required for only unexpected losses as expected losses are to be borne by P&L reserves. Therefore the operational risk capital requirements for a low severity high frequency risk is likely to be low when compared to other risks that are lower frequency but higher severity.

Thus Choice 'c' is the correct answer.

Once the frequency distribution has been determined (for example, using the binomial, Poisson or the negative binomial distributions) and the severity distribution has also been determined (for example, using the lognormal, gamma or other functions), the loss distribution can be produced by a Monte Carlo simulation using successive drawings from each of these two distributions. It is assumed that the severity and frequency are independent of each other. The resulting distribution gives a distribution showing the losses for operational risk, from which there Op Risk VaR can be determined using the appropriate percentile.Therefore Choice 'b' is the correct answer.

A PRNG (pseudo random number generators of the kind included in statistical packages and Excel) is used to generate random numbers that are not correlated with each other, ie they are random. A Markov process is a stochastic model that depends only upon its current state. Simulation underlies many financial calculations. None of these directly relate to generating correlated multivariate normal random numbers. That job is done utilizing a Cholesky decomposition of the correlation matrix.

Specifically, a Cholesky decomposition involves the factorization of the correlation matrix into a lower triangular matrix (a square matrix all of whose entries above the diagonal are zero) and its transpose. This can then be combined with random numbers to generate a set of correlated normal random numbers. This technique is used for calculating Monte Carlo VaR.

Recovery rates vary a great deal from year to year, and are difficult to predict. Therefore statement III is true. Similarly, any attempt to predict these is hamstrung by a high standard error, which can be as high as the historical mean itself. The error does not cancel itself out due to the effect of the business cycle making the error directionally biased. Thus statement IV is false.

Statement II is true as these are all factors that make forecasting recovery rates for any credit risk model rather difficult. Statement I is false because recovery rates are difficult to predict and assumptions are not easy to make.

According to the Basel II framework, Tier 1 capital, also called core capital or basic equity, includes equity capital and disclosed reserves.

Tier 2 capital, also called supplementary capital, includes undisclosed reserves, revaluation reserves, general provisions/general loan-loss reserves, hybrid debt capital instruments and subordinated term debt issued originally for 5 years or longer.

Tier 3 capital, or short term subordinated debt, is intended only to cover market risk but only at the discretion of their national authority. This only includes short term subordinated debt originally issued for 2 or more years.

An interesting thing to note is the difference between 'subordinated term debt' under Tier 2 and the 'short term subordinated debt' under Tier 3. The distinction is based upon the years to maturity at the time the debt was issued. The remaining time to maturity is not relevant. For the subordinated term debt included under Tier 2, the amount that can be counted towards capital is reduced by 20% for every year when the debt is due within 5 years. This takes care of the time to maturity problem for Tier 2 subordinated debt. For Tier 3 short term subordinated debt, this is not an issue because debt will only qualify for Tier 3 if it has a lock-in clause stipulating that the debt is not required to be repaid if the effect of such repayment is to take the bank below minimum capital requirements.

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.

According to the Basel II framework, Tier 1 capital, also called core capital or basic equity, includes equity capital and disclosed reserves.

Tier 2 capital, also called supplementary capital, includes undisclosed reserves, revaluation reserves, general provisions/general loan-loss reserves, hybrid debt capital instruments and subordinated term debt.

Tier 3 capital, or short term subordinated debt, is intended only to cover market risk but only at the discretion of their national authority.

The change in the price of a security that follows a Weiner process is determined by its standard deviation and expected return. To get the price itself, we need to add this change in price to the current price. Therefore the future price in a Weiner process is determined by all three of current price, expected return and standard deviation.