The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how well Swedish banks’ follow the interest rate development of Swedish Treasury Bills and Swedish Government Bonds when they are determining the levels for their deposit and lending rates. Individuals’ deposits in a bank serves as one of the banks main assets in the balance sheet, and the spread between the bank’s deposit rate and the short-term market rate is a large source of funding for the bank. If there is a strong relationship of this spread over time, one may assume that this spread is of great importance for financing of the banking firm. The spread between the bank’s lending rate and the long-term market rate – credit risk spread – also serves a large source of interest income for the bank, and if this relationship is strong over time, one may assume that this spread is of great importance for financing of the banking firm as well. The banks subjected for investigation in this paper are Handelsbanken (SHB) and Föreningssparbanken (FSB). This paper finds a weaker relationship between the banks’ deposit rates and the short-term market rates, than for the lending rates and the long-term market rates. This indicates that the credit risk spread is of greater importance for financing of the banking firm than the funding spread. The weaker relationship between the banks’ deposit rates and the short-term market rate may be due to the great variability of savings alternatives offered in the market place today. The fact that banks today have deposit-deficit may also explain the weaker relationship, which may be explained by the Baumol-Tobin transaction model – where the higher the interest rate, the greater amount is being kept in the account. The stronger relationship between the banks’ lending rate and the long-term market rate may be due to the nature of the credit risk spread to function as a price-discrimination tool between lending clients.

Consumer credit has become increasingly popular in Russia over the past few years. With the rapid growth of lending to individuals and companies, the need for accumulation of credit histories and information, collection services of bad debts, and credit insurance and financing also become of increased importance. It was found in this thesis that the larger credit limit given to corporate clients, the greater will the loss be if there is a default and the money cannot be collected. Giving credit to a small number of customers also increases the concentration of the risk. The opportunity to diversify in consumer credit is, however, limited because of the geo-graphic concentration of the customers, and the macro economic risk cannot be elimi-nated. Credit periods in consumer credit are in general longer, leading to higher uncertainty of payment and hence higher exposure to risk. Personal relationships are not established with customers in consumer credit, which are argued to act as “insurances” in corporate credit. Consumer credit is more common among international companies, leading to better offers and more flexibility in the service. Insurers of corporate credit have a restrictive policy with higher premiums and more administrative work, which is less attractive for companies to take on. Creditors also have to share the risk with insurance companies, often having to pay more than 15 percent of a default. With respect to what was mentioned above, it was concluded in this thesis that the risk of giving credit to individuals does not necessary have to be higher than that of corporate cli-ents, but that the terms of the contract is more favourable for the creditor in consumer credit.

Nedgångar i världsekonomin med påföljande likviditetsproblem hos företag har medfört negativa konsekvenser för banker, vilket skapade behov av effektiv kreditriskhantering. För att förhindra stora kreditförluster försöker banker ständigt minimera sina risker vid kreditgivning genom att identifiera fallgropar. Syftet är att undersöka vilka faktorer som bidrar till kreditförluster och belysa hur Nordea kan minimera risker vid kreditgivning utifrån dessa faktorer. Datainsamling skedde via granskning av litteratur och en fallstudie. Studieobjektet var affärsbanken Nordea där det genomfördes flera intervjuer med kreditansvariga på en regional nivå. För att ta reda på utvecklingen av kreditvolym inom Sverige sammanställdes data utifrån kreditgivningsstatistik från Nordea Hypotek AB. Enligt teorin är kreditförluster beroende av direkta och indirekta faktorer. Medan de direkta faktorerna kan påverkas av en kreditanalytiker ligger de indirekta faktorer utanför dennes inflytande. Det kan konstateras att Nordea har lyckats minimera kreditrisker i avsevärd grad med reservation för vissa förbättringar och att de faktorer som förorsakar förluster har banken klarat av att hålla under kontroll. Bankens grundläggande strategi i riskhanteringen är att använda sig av förnuftig kreditgivning. Samtliga respondenter har betonat vikten av att göra grundliga utredningar vid nya kreditansökningar samt frekventa uppföljningar vid en föraning på betalsvårigheter hos befintliga kredittagare. Genom dessa rutiner kan banken fånga upp problematiska affärstransaktioner och förebygga uppkomsten av kreditförluster. / Turbulence in the world economy with following liquidity problem in enterprises has lead to negative consequences for banks that creates a need for effective credit risk management. To prevent significant credit losses, banks tries constantly to minimize their risks in credit granting through identifying pitfalls. The purpose is to investigate the factors that contribute to the credit losses and illustrate how Nordea can minimize risks in credit granting. Data were gathered from the literature review and a case study. The object of study is the Swedish Business Bank Nordea where several credit managers has been interviewed at the regional level. To obtain a volume of credit development in Sweden, gathered the credit granting statistics of the source of Nordea Hypotek AB. According to the theory credit losses are depending on direct and indirect factors. While direct factors can be affected by a credit analyst, indirect factors are outside of his influence. It can be stated that Nordea has been succeed in minimizing of risks at the considerable degree, with reservation for some improvements, and that some factors that cause losses the bank manage to keep under control. Bank´s fundamental strategy in risk management is to use reasonable credit granting. All of respondents have stressed the importance of thorough inquiry on new credit application and frequent following up suspicions of payment difficulties with existing borrowers. Through these routines can bank capture problematic business transactions and prevent appearance of credit losses.

Today all private corporations are obligated by statutory audit. The government of Sweden appointed an investigation to conclude if the audit should be statutory or not. The investigator presented on the third of April 2008 a report (SOU 2008:32) that suggests abolishment of the statutory audit for approximately 97 % of all private corporations in Sweden. This will result in certain effects on the banks credit rating because of the fact that the banks trust the audited accounts to have been audited by an independent audit. The most important in the banks credit rating are: personal judgement, business concept, business plan and repayment ability. The banks also use the private corporations audited accounts in its credit rating. We conducted a case study by interviewing four bank officials in different banks in Skövde and Tibro. The purpose of the study was to investigate the banks credit rating and the audits importance in the credit rating. The conclusion deducted from our case study it that the confidence between the bank and the company is very high valued and that the audit is a sign of quality.

Banking is topic, practice, business or profession almost as old as the very existence of man, but literarily it can be rooted deep back the days of the Renaissance (by the Florentine Bankers). It has sprouted from the very primitive Stone-age banking, through the Victorian-age to the technology-driven Google-age banking, encompassing automatic teller machines (ATMs), credit and debit cards, correspondent and internet banking. Credit risk has always been a vicinity of concern not only to bankers but to all in the business world because the risks of a trading partner not fulfilling his obligations in full on due date can seriously jeopardize the affaires of the other partner. The axle of this study is to have a clearer picture of how banks manage their credit risk. In this light, the study in its first section gives a background to the study and the second part is a detailed literature review on banking and credit risk management tools and assessment models. The third part of this study is on hypothesis testing and use is made of a simple regression model. This leads us to conclude in the last section that banks with good credit risk management policies have a lower loan default rate and relatively higher interest income.

This thesis investigates the pricing of sovereign credit risk in the bond and credit default swap (CDS) market for Turkey. Using daily data, CDS premiums and Emerging Market Bond Index (EMBI) are examined over the period 1, January 2001- 20, June 2012. Firstly, the short-run and long-run determinants of CDS premiums are compared with those of EMBI, employing the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach. Then, the basis, the difference between CDS and EMBI spreads is analyzed seeking the factors which drive the two markets apart. Empirical results reveal that the CDS and bond market price credit events differently and hence, two spreads deviates in the short run. On the other hand, cointegration analysis shows that two prices move together in the long run, as theory predicts. Applying VECM analysis, the findings suggest that CDS spreads move ahead of the EMBI in the terms of price adjustment.

Despite the vital role that banks play in Financial markets (FM) by connecting lenders to borrowers, instability in these financial markets, currency values and the global environment has affected the profitability of banks with those in Sweden inclusive. Most if not all companies including banks go into business because they want to create value. The banks like other firms thus look for ways to manage their risks while striving to improve productivity and performance for this value to be created. This productivity only comes when the banks give credits to customers from money deposited by shareholders or savings from customers thus putting them at risk in case of default. Despite this risk, the bank cannot stop the business of credit granting because it is the main source of its profitability. So she finds herself in a situation with profitability on the one hand and risk of default on the other hand. For success to be attained, the only option is good credit risk management practices since in the process, returns are correlated to risk. The risk management practices vary from bank to bank depending on its policies on credit granting decisions. Different banks prioritize the information gotten about customers for credit assessment differently and although they are faced with the same type of risk, their techniques of management are different. This paper is thus geared towards looking at how some banks in Sweden go about their credit risk management activities by looking at the qualities which they consider of companies before granting them credits. This study was carried out using a qualitative research method and open ended interviews. The sample group consisted of three banks in Umeå, Sweden. The analysis of the empirical data showed that credit risk management occupies an indispensible position when lending decisions are carried out. It also goes ahead to show that even though banks may be faced with the same risks, their credit risk management techniques differ, the importance given to the information used for credit assessment differs from bank to bank and collaterals also play a very important role in credit granting decisions. So, for greater results of credit risk management to be attained, banks must value all information about the customer perfectly because any neglected information can be the root cause of their problem or default. Key words: Credit risk, risk management, financial markets, financial intermediaries.

This study develops a dynamic importance sampling method (DIS) for numerical simulations of rare events. The DIS method is flexible, fast, and accurate. The most importance is that it is very easy to implement. It could be applied to any multifactor copula models, which conduct by arbitrary independent random variables. First, the key common factor (KCF) is determined by the maximum value among the coefficients of factor loadings. Second, searching the indicator by the order statistics and applying the truncated sampling techniques, the probability of large losses (PLL) and the expected excess loss above threshold (EELAT) can be estimated precisely. Except for the assumption that the factor loadings of KCF do not exit zero elements, we do not impose any restrictions on the composition of the portfolio. The DIS method developed in this study can therefore be applied to a very wide range of credit risk models. Comparison of the numerical experiment between the method of Glasserman, Kang and Shahabuddin (2008) and the DIS method developed in this study, under the multifactor Gaussian copula model and the high market impact condition (the factor loadings of marketwide factor of 0.8), both variance reduction ratio and efficient ratio of the DIS model are much better than that of Glasserman et al. (2008)¡¦s. And both results approximate when the factor loadings of marketwide factor decreases to the range of 0.5 to 0.25. However, the DIS method is superior to the method of Glasserman et al. (2008) in terms of the practicability. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that the DIS method is not only feasible to the general market conditions, but also particularly to the high market impact condition, especially in credit contagion or market collapse environments. It is also noted that the numerical results indicate that the DIS estimators exit bounded relative error.

In order to get maximum profit, investors start to high attention on risk management after financial crisis in 2008. Therefore, risk management and predict become more and more complex. This paper mainly focuses on two risks, including non-systematic risk and credit risk. After financial crisis, countries pay more attention on credit risk, and now because of Europe debt crisis, investors and governments are also concerned with the messages about credit rating which are published by Credit Rating Agency. Besides credit risk, the firm¡¦s specific risk (i.e. non-systematic risk) is also more important than before. Recent empirical studies find that the stock is not on affected by systematic risk, but also affected by non-systematic risk. According to Kuo and Lu (2005), this thesis uses two models: Moody¡¦s KMV credit model and Markov regime switching model to estimate credit risk and non-systematic risk. The period is from January 2002 to November 2010. Testing samples are data from constituent stocks of the Taiwan 50. The purpose of this paper is researching the relationship between credit risk and non-systematic risk. The empirical results show that there is the positive relationship between non-systematic risk and credit risk. And among different industries, non-systematic risk or credit risk also shows the significant differences. For plastic industry and communications network industry, there is lower credit risk. However, for electronics industry and financial industry, there is higher credit risk. The study also found that even in the same industry, each company will face different risk level.

none