Free PRMIA 8010 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 3

Collateral, limits to avoid credit exposure concentrations, termination rights based upon credit ratings, third party guarantees and credit derivatives are all tools or instruments that financial institutions use to manage their credit risk. A cumulative accuracy plot measures the accuracy of ratings, and is not a tool for managing credit risk. Therefore Choice 'b' represents the correct answer.

All the reasons and risks presented above are valid reasons for using scenario analysis, except V and VI - ie, the need to reduce the complexity of calculations is not a valid reason for using scenario analysis. Similarly, making operational risk capital estimates match management's desired capital allocation targets is also not a valid reason. Capital calculations are intended to provide adequate capital for managing the risk from operations, regardless of what management may desire them to be.

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 ratherdifficult. Statement I is false because recovery rates are difficult to predict and assumptions are not easy to make.

Choice 'c' correctly describes Altman's z-score. All other choices are incorrect.

The cumulative probability of default for the security for the 5 years is [1 - (1 - probability of default upto year 4)*(1 - probability of default in year 5)]. An easier way to think about this is that the Probability of survival till year 5 = (Probability of survival till year 4 * Probability of survival during year 5). Using the relationship that probability of default = 1 - probability of survival, we can calculate the required probability in all cases.

In this case, the cumulative probability of default for the security for 5 years = 1 - (1 - 11.47%)*(1 - 5%) = 15.8695%, therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer.

A situation where a firm has more liabilities than assets does not necessarily implydefault, so long as the firm is able to pay its obligations when they come due. Therefore, short term debts have a greater bearing on a firm's default than longer term debt. However, this is not to say that merely having enough to pay off the short term debts (ie debts due within one year) is enough to avoid default. Over time, the long term debt will also be turning to short term debt, and it may not be possible for the firm to roll over its liabilities without lenders considering the long term debt. The KMV approach considers the entire short term debt and half of the long term debt as the critical value of assets below which default will be triggered. Therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer.

Unexpected loss for a credit portfolio refers to the excess of the VaR estimate over the average expected loss. Theterm 'unexpected loss' has this specific meaning in the context of credit risk, and not any other intuitive meaning. So if for a portfolio worth $100m expected losses are 4%, and the credit VaR at 99% is $12m, then unexpected losses at that VaR quintile are $8m. This is unrelated to actual realized losses versus expected losses.

Therefore Choice 'd' is the correct answer and the others are not.

Unexpected loss is used to determine the capital reserves to be maintained against a credit portfolio at a certain level of confidence.

Some risk experts have suggested the use of extreme value theory to model tail risk or extreme events for operational risk. The generalized Pareto model or the Peaks-over-Threshold (POT) model are often used to model extreme value distributions, and therefore Choice 'a' is the correct answer.

Concentration risk in a credit portfolio arises due to a high degree of correlation betweenthe default probabilities of the issuers of securities in the portfolio. For example, the fortunes of the issuers in the same industry may be highly correlated, and an investor exposed to multiple such borrowers may face 'concentration risk'.

A low degreeof correlation, or independence of individual defaults in the portfolio actually reduces or even eliminates concentration risk.

The fact that issuers are from the same country may not necessarily give rise to concentration risk - for example, a bank withall US based borrowers in different industries or with different retail exposure types may not face practically any concentration risk. What really matters is the default correlations between the borrowers, for example a lender exposed to cement producersacross the globe may face a high degree of concentration risk.

Statement I is correct as credit VaR calculations often use a one year time horizon. This is primarily because the cycle in respect of credit related activities, such as loan loss reviews, accounting cycles for borrowers etc last a year.

Statement II is false. There are two ways in which loss assessments in respect of credit risk can be made: default mode, where losses are considered only in respect of default, and no losses are recognized in respect of the deterioration of the creditworthiness of the borrower (which is often expressed through a credit rating transition matrix); and the mark-to-market mode, where losses due to both defaults and credit quality are considered. The default mode is used for the loan book where the institution has lentmoneys and generally intends to hold the loan on its books till maturity. The mark to market mode is used for traded securities which are not held to maturity, or are held only for trading.

Statement III is correct. The confidence interval, or the quintile of losses used for maintaining credit ratings tends to be very high as the possibility of the institution's default needs to be remote.

Statement IV is correct too, for the reasons explained earlier.