Finance, also known as financial economics, is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related with, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services. Finance activities take place in financial systems at various scopes, thus the field can be roughly divided into personal, corporate, and public finance.
A credit risk is risk of default on a debt that may arise from a borrower failing to make required payments. In the first resort, the risk is that of the lender and includes lost principal and interest, disruption to cash flows, and increased collection costs. The loss may be complete or partial. In an efficient market, higher levels of credit risk will be associated with higher borrowing costs. Because of this, measures of borrowing costs such as yield spreads can be used to infer credit risk levels based on assessments by market participants.
Liquidity risk is a financial risk that for a certain period of time a given financial asset, security or commodity cannot be traded quickly enough in the market without impacting the market price.
In finance, leverage is any technique involving borrowing funds to buy things, hoping that future profits will be many times more than the cost of borrowing. This technique is named after a lever in physics, which amplifies a small input force into a greater output force, because successful leverage amplifies the comparatively small amount of money needed for borrowing into large amounts of profit. However, the technique also involves the high risk of not being able to pay back a large loan. Normally, a lender will set a limit on how much risk it is prepared to take and will set a limit on how much leverage it will permit, and would require the acquired asset to be provided as collateral security for the loan.
Financial risk management is the practice of protecting economic value in a firm by using financial instruments to manage exposure to financial risk - principally operational risk, credit risk and market risk, with more specific variants as listed aside. As for risk management more generally, financial risk management requires identifying its sources, measuring it, and the plans to address them. See Finance § Risk management.
Interest rate risk is the risk that arises for bond owners from fluctuating interest rates. How much interest rate risk a bond has depends on how sensitive its price is to interest rate changes in the market. The sensitivity depends on two things, the bond's time to maturity, and the coupon rate of the bond.
Financial risk is any of various types of risk associated with financing, including financial transactions that include company loans in risk of default. Often it is understood to include only downside risk, meaning the potential for financial loss and uncertainty about its extent.
The Jarrow–Turnbull model is a widely used "reduced-form" credit risk model. It was published in 1995 by Robert A. Jarrow and Stuart Turnbull. Under the model, which returns the corporate's probability of default, bankruptcy is modeled as a statistical process. The model extends the reduced-form model of Merton (1976) to a random interest rates framework.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to finance:
The term Advanced IRB or A-IRB is an abbreviation of advanced internal ratings-based approach, and it refers to a set of credit risk measurement techniques proposed under Basel II capital adequacy rules for banking institutions.
Probability of default (PD) is a financial term describing the likelihood of a default over a particular time horizon. It provides an estimate of the likelihood that a borrower will be unable to meet its debt obligations.
A structured investment vehicle (SIV) is a non-bank financial institution established to earn a credit spread between the longer-term assets held in its portfolio and the shorter-term liabilities it issues. They are simple credit spread lenders, frequently "lending" by investing in securitizations, but also by investing in corporate bonds and funding by issuing commercial paper and medium term notes, which were usually rated AAA until the onset of the financial crisis. They did not expose themselves to either interest rate or currency risk and typically held asset to maturity. SIVs differ from asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) in that they are permanently capitalized and have an active management team.
Asset and liability management is the practice of managing financial risks that arise due to mismatches between the assets and liabilities as part of an investment strategy in financial accounting.
The interest sensitivity gap was one of the first techniques used in asset liability management to manage interest rate risk. The use of this technique was initiated in the middle 1970s in the United States when rising interest rates in 1975-1976 and again from 1979 onward triggered a banking crisis that later resulted in more than $1 trillion in losses when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation were forced to liquidate hundreds of failed institutions who had typically lent for long maturities at fixed interest rates and borrowed for much shorter maturities. The interest rate sensitivity gap classifies all assets, liabilities and off balance sheet transactions by effective maturity from an interest rate reset perspective. A thirty-year fixed rate mortgage would be classified as a 30-year instrument. A 15-year mortgage with a rate fixed only for the first year would be classified as a one-year instrument. The interest rate sensitivity gap compares the amount of assets and liabilities in each time period in the interest rate sensitivity gap table. This comparison gives an approximate view of the interest rate risk of the balance sheet being analyzed. The interest rate sensitivity gap is much less accurate than modern interest rate risk management technology where the impact of a change in the yield curve can be analyzed using the Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework based on the work of researchers such as John Hull, Alan White, Robert C. Merton, Robert A. Jarrow and many others.
The CAMELS rating is a supervisory rating system originally developed in the U.S. to classify a bank's overall condition. It is applied to every bank and credit union in the U.S. and is also implemented outside the U.S. by various banking supervisory regulators.
Moody's Analytics is a subsidiary of Moody's Corporation established in 2007 to focus on non-rating activities, separate from Moody's Investors Service. It provides economic research regarding risk, performance and financial modeling, as well as consulting, training and software services. Moody's Analytics is composed of divisions such as Moody's KMV, Moody's Economy.com, Moody's Wall Street Analytics, the Institute of Risk Standards and Qualifications, and Canadian Securities Institute Global Education Inc.
Under the Basel II guidelines, banks are allowed to use their own estimated risk parameters for the purpose of calculating regulatory capital. This is known as the internal ratings-based (IRB) approach to capital requirements for credit risk. Only banks meeting certain minimum conditions, disclosure requirements and approval from their national supervisor are allowed to use this approach in estimating capital for various exposures.
Corporate finance is the area of finance that deals with sources of funding, the capital structure of corporations, the actions that managers take to increase the value of the firm to the shareholders, and the tools and analysis used to allocate financial resources. The primary goal of corporate finance is to maximize or increase shareholder value.
Financial stability is a property of a financial system that dissipates financial imbalances that arise endogenously in the financial markets or as a result of significant adverse and unforeseeable circumstances. When stable, the system absorbs economic shocks primarily via self-corrective mechanisms, preventing the adverse events from disrupting the real economy or spreading over to other financial systems. Financial stability is paramount for economic growth, as most transactions in the real economy are made through the financial system.
The Merton model, developed by Robert C. Merton in 1974, is a widely used credit risk model. Analysts and investors utilize the Merton model to understand how capable a company is at meeting financial obligations, servicing its debt, and weighing the general possibility that it will go into credit default.
