Posts Tagged ‘risk’

Replacement risk

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

Replacement risk arises when a bank has an obligation to one party where the discharge of that obligation is conditional on a third party meeting its obligation to the bank. For example, the bank may have sold stock to the first party. It intends to deliver this stock using stock it has bought but not yet received from a third party. If the third party fails to deliver its stock the bank will have to buy it from the market at a potentially higher price.
The most common primary cause of bank failures is insolvency arising from credit losses. This is followed by failure to manage interest rate risk and foreign exchange risk. Failures arising from fraud, market risk and liquidity risk tend to hit the headlines but are far less common than those due to these first two factors.

Operational risk

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Operational risk is a catchall category for other things that could go wrong. It includes potentially catastrophic events such as earthquakes, flooding and fire and other more mundane factors such as power, computer or telecommunications failures.

Fraud

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

Banks are at risk from fraud and other criminal behavior by their staff, customers and counterparties. In some cases these actions may involve actual theft but in other cases it may simply involve the concealment of losses that do not become apparent until a later date.

Country risk

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

A US bank with operations in a foreign country is, for example, at risk from the imposition of capital controls preventing it from remitting any profits or other funds it has in that country. In extreme cases foreign banks may even have their assets appropriated.