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Invite colleaguesEconomic capital: A brief history and practical applications today
Abstract
Learning from trends on capital levels leading into the Great Recession of 2008, this paper presents three approaches for mining the benefits of economic capital today to inform strategic planning and help with capital management. The paper recognises the benefits of economic capital over the standardised regulatory risk weight method. Economic capital’s distribution-oriented measures better discriminate risk across assets over plausible worst-case scenarios; however, this paper surmises that economic capital models contributed to financial institutions having less capital than needed to weather the Great Recession. It explains how correlation treatment and understating ‘tail’ risk in those models may have understated capital needs in severe stress conditions. Using historical performance data, the paper illustrates the impact of losing diversification benefits. It also quantifies tail risk for four business lines common to US financial institutions. The paper concludes with methods for recognising when economic capital approaches need to be adjusted to avoid understating unexpected loss in some cases and overstating unexpected loss in others. It offers solutions for avoiding both types of errors, including leveraging off the infrastructure built up by US financial institutions in response to stress testing requirements. The paper provides templates for readers to build on for their own capital planning framework.
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Tally Ferguson is currently the Director of Enterprise-wide Risk Management at BOK Financial. As such, he works with four teams who are crucial to the success of the company’s enterprise-wide risk management: risk governance, market risk, model analytics and operational risk. Tally has served at BOK Financial for over 20 years, having responsibilities ranging from dealer and capital markets compliance to the corporate insurance programme. Prior to coming to BOK Financial in 1996, Tally was a regulatory consultant for Ernst & Young and helped clients implement numerous regulatory initiatives including comprehensive risk management programmes and interest rate risk initiatives. Tally got his introduction to banking as an examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he began in 1985 and progressed to supervising examiner by March 1994. Tally has an undergraduate degree in economics and mathematics from Yale University and an executive MBA from the Wharton School. He is a CFA charter holder, carries Series 7, 24, 63, 4 and 53 licences, and is a certified enterprise risk professional. He is also an adjunct instructor of finance at the University of Tulsa.
Citation
Ferguson, Tally (2018, December 1). Economic capital: A brief history and practical applications today. In the Journal of Risk Management in Financial Institutions, Volume 12, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.69554/OTNH6466.Publications LLP