HomeAll

Corporate bonds dance to the central banks’ tune

9 October 2019Economicscorporate bonds, quantitative easingNick Dunbar

This year’s reversal in central bank sentiment has swept through the corporate bond market

BNP Paribas piles on the senior tranches

8 October 2019BanksCLOs, credit ratings, securitisationNick Dunbar

The French banking giant more than doubled its securitisation exposure in the past 12 months, filings show. Does the ballooning CLO portfolio pose a risk?

Europe’s negative yield explosion

18 July 2019EconomicsECB, quantitative easingNick Dunbar

Amounts of negative-yielding euro debt have surged to record levels in anticipation of further easing. But how effective is the ECB’s strategy?

The year that transformed Britain’s LOBO landscape

12 July 2019Municipal FinanceLOBOs, Newham council, RBSNick Dunbar

Gauging the significance of the LOBO redemption wave

The Sharpe Ratio Ratio

1 July 2019Research & presentationsinvesting, quantitative analysisNick Dunbar

Portfolio optimisers often give results that are extreme and unstable. With so many variables involved, it can be hard to decipher why. This article presents a simplified formula for a two-asset optimisation which will bolster your intuitive understanding of how a portfolio optimiser behaves and why it may behave badly. Download the paper here About…

Smart Beta and Dumb Optimisation

28 June 2019Asset ManagementNick Dunbar

Portfolio optimisation has transformed investing in recent decades. But according to a new paper, naive application of such modelling can lead to extreme or unstable trading strategies.

Inside China’s real estate bond boom

21 June 2019Articles, Risk CommentaryNick Dunbar

As trade tensions worsen, dollar-denominated bond issuance by Chinese real estate companies is at a record high, while credit spreads have tightened.

Leveraging the Powell put in US M&A markets

21 June 2019Articles, Risk CommentaryNick Dunbar

With a softening approach from central banks, borrowing-driven M&A is being rewarded

What happened in bank risk last year?

29 March 2019BanksNick Dunbar

Dismantling Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan’s Steinhoff fallout and the return of securitisation

Handicapping Goldman’s 1MDB liabilities

30 January 2019Banks, Risk CommentaryGoldman Sachs, operational riskNick Dunbar

The 1MDB scandal may result in a record legal settlement for Goldman Sachs. Risky Finance visualises the expected loss and explores how life-changing it might be for Goldman.

Where would the market be without share buybacks?

4 January 2019Articlesequities, S&P 500Nick Dunbar

The decline in equity markets seen in the last few months would have been worse without the countervailing effect of buybacks. But by how much?

Collins wedge pushes internal credit models towards irrelevance

2 November 2018Banks, Risk CommentaryBasel rules, Dodd-Frank Act, Federal Reserve, JP Morgan, PNC Financial, Wells FargoNick Dunbar

The Collins amendment has become a binding capital constraint for the biggest US banks. Does this support the Fed’s argument for rolling back the advanced approaches provisions of Dodd-Frank?

The Book of Why

14 October 2018Book Reviewsartificial intelligence, Bayesian probability, scienceNick Dunbar

Judea Pearl’s causal modelling and a critique of AI

Year of the MAGA stock

11 September 2018Articlescompetition, research & development, technology, volatilityNick Dunbar

Just four S&P 500 companies gained $1 trillion of market cap this year. Was this prophesised by a trio of academics?

Turkey’s crisis in six charts

15 August 2018Articles, Economics, Risk CommentaryEmerging markets, TurkeyNick Dunbar

Turkey faces an economic crisis as its dispute with the US escalates. We highlight Turkey’s financial vulnerabilities with six charts.

Advances in Financial Machine Learning

1 August 2018Book ReviewsRobert Carver

by Marcos Lopez de Prado Wiley 2018 Overfitting is the curse of anyone who tries to use the past to predict the future. Forecasting is a delicate balance between two extremes: at one end we risk creating a model which is too simplistic to be of practical use, whilst at the other the model is…

Tracking the frontier markets debt bubble

23 July 2018EconomicsAfrica, Emerging markets, frontier markets, government bondsNick Dunbar

Frontier market sovereigns are splurging on new borrowing just as investors are cooling on the asset class. A Risky Finance visualisation tool identifies the countries you need to watch.

The Fed’s troubling stress test calculations

12 July 2018BanksCCAR, Stress testsNick Dunbar

The Fed’s annual stress tests and capital analysis amount to a contest between the regulator’s models of large banks in a crisis and those of the banks themselves. The latest disclosures suggest troubling flaws in the Fed’s calculations.

The music won’t stop soon in media-telecom merger frenzy

22 June 2018Mergers & acquisitionsmergers & acquisitionsNick Dunbar

The AT&T Time Warner merger, and the battle between Comcast and Disney for Fox will prompt a vast amount of new borrowing. The spillover effects on other borrowers in the media and telecom sectors could be challenging.

Hunting for the next LTCM

14 June 2018Asset Managementhedge funds, leverage, Long-Term Capital ManagementNick Dunbar

The Dodd-Frank Act assigned the SEC the role of gathering data on hedge funds. Risky Finance has turned the published statistics into a visualisation tool and asks whether a new LTCM could be lurking in the data.

Italy’s populists throw down gauntlet to Draghi

25 May 2018Articles, EconomicsECB, European Central Bank, Italy, quantitative easingNick Dunbar

Italy’s new populist government is on a collision course with the ECB, which is mulling the tapering of QE purchases. But inflation divergence suggests a way out for the central bank.

Hefty swap bets fail to lift Total Return Fund

24 May 2018Fundsexchange-traded funds, PimcoNick Dunbar

In a time of rising bond yields, active bond funds can use derivatives to manage duration risk. But as the experience of Pimco shows, attempts to generate alpha this way do not justify the risks or management costs.

Is Pimco’s Ivascyn hooked on credit default swaps?

3 May 2018Fundscredit default swaps, PimcoNick Dunbar

Pimco’s star manager uses credit default swaps to boost returns and increase inflows to his fund. How transparent are the risks?

Should councils pay interest penalties on government loans?

26 April 2018Municipal FinanceNick Dunbar

Market-based loan repayment penalties imposed by the UK government are being blamed for worsening pressures faced by local councils, and incentivising property speculation. Now calls are being made to reform the system.

US banks grow assets beneath regulatory radar

17 April 2018BanksBank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Wells FargoNick Dunbar

Since adopting Basel III reporting standards three years ago, the biggest US banks have started reducing risk weights while increasing lending. Is this a reflection of a healthy US economy or European-style gaming of internal models?

What causes trading volume?

12 April 2018Research & presentationseconomics, tradingNick Dunbar

Trading volume is much higher than economists predict. Quant Tom Hyer addresses the paradox from the perspective of relative value.

Putting employees over shareholders doomed Deutsche’s Cryan

6 April 2018BanksNick Dunbar

Deutsche Bank’s inability to control its investment bank compensation bill may have doomed John Cryan, analysis of pay disclosures suggests.

Did Bayes’ theorem kill a woman in Arizona?

23 March 2018Technologyartificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Google, UberNick Dunbar

The death of a pedestrian hit by an Uber self-driving car highlights the need to understand the decision-making of autonomous vehicles. The story goes back 17 years to when the technology was first refined.

Steinhoff, the banks and the bezzle

2 March 2018Articles, BanksNick Dunbar

A scandal at South African group Steinhoff has hit the large banks that lent $1.6bn to the company’s largest shareholder. Differences in the way banks treated the exposure highlight hidden risks in the financial system.

Did EU banks really ‘slash’ exposure to the UK?

13 December 2017Articles, BanksBrexitNick Dunbar

A €350bn decline in the exposure of EU banks to UK counterparties was widely interpreted as an exodus sparked by Brexit, but closer analysis of the data refutes this interpretation.

How the Greeks and the EU forgot to argue about debt relief and learned to cooperate

17 November 2017Articles, Sovereigneconomics, eurozone, GreeceNick Dunbar

After years of mistakes, Greece is on the verge of recovery while a campaign to recognise debt relief in its accounts has fizzled out.

What risk disclosures tell us about Goldman’s problems and Morgan Stanley’s success

8 September 2017BanksNick Dunbar

Morgan Stanley has vaulted over Goldman this year in fixed income trading. Analysis of risk disclosures helps explain the divergence between the two firms.

Council borrowing event presentation

19 July 2017Research & presentationsNick Dunbar

Presentation to council borrowing event, London 18th July 2017

Are the Dodd-Frank stress tests running out of steam?

11 July 2017BanksNick Dunbar

Is the Fed’s DFAST stress test telling us that banks are getting safer, or are the banks just getting better at doing the internal modelling?

A History of British Actuarial Thought

30 June 2017Book Reviewsbook reviews, derivatives, economics, life insurance, pensionsNick Dunbar

by Craig Turnbull Palgrave Macmillan 2016 The reputation of actuaries in the UK has declined precipitously in the last three decades. Once they were among the most powerful decision makers in Britain’s financial sector, albeit semi-invisible. Today their role has been sharply curtailed by regulation and market trends, while their profession struggles to articulate its…

UK local authority debt in six charts

20 March 2017ArticlesNick Dunbar

Dozens of UK councils are paying a significant proportion of tax revenues in debt interest payments, and the burden is worsened by record low interest rates

Brexit and HSBC’s risk reduction bonuses

15 March 2017Articles, BanksNick Dunbar

HSBC paid senior executives millions in bonuses for achieving RWA reduction targets. But how much was the result of their efforts?

The mystery of Barclays’ LOBO waiver

2 February 2017ArticlesNick Dunbar

Why did the bank unilaterally waive LOBO provisions in loans last year, losing as much as £1 billion in the process?

S&P 500 cash holdings and corporate tax reform

1 February 2017ArticlesNick Dunbar

S&P 500 companies have $2.4 trillion of cash and investments which may soon be repatriated back to the US as a result of tax reforms. We visualise the size of this cash pile relative to market cap.

ETFs, capital arbitrage and Morgan Stanley

22 January 2017Uncategorizedderivative assets, exchange-traded funds, high yield bonds, incremental risk charge, Market RWAs, Morgan Stanley, securities financingNick Dunbar

After making dramatic cuts to its balance sheet and capital requirements, Morgan Stanley is boosting returns in fixed income. Is the bank using bond ETFs for regulatory capital arbitrage?

Toblerones, Pampers and the retreat from currency hedging

3 January 2017Articles, Consumer Goods, News topicsNick Dunbar

In the wake of unprecedented currency shifts, consumer goods companies are reducing hedging in favour of product sizing techniques to retain customers

Morgan Stanley’s capital secret

3 January 2017Articles, BanksNick Dunbar

After making dramatic cuts to its balance sheet and capital requirements, Morgan Stanley is boosting returns in fixed income. Is the bank using bond ETFs for regulatory capital arbitrage?

Season of goodwill

22 December 2016Articles, BanksNick Dunbar

Christmas is when European banks typically book restructuring costs and goodwill writedowns. A study of quarterly profits shows the divergence versus US banks.

Who benefits the most from ECB bond buying?

14 December 2016ArticlesNick Dunbar

ECB president Mario Draghi says that corporate bond purchases are a success. Using securities lending disclosures allows the hypothesis to be tested with the help of an animated bubble chart.

US inflation gap adds to TIPS puzzle

1 December 2016Articles, SovereignNick Dunbar

Market expectations of future US inflation have risen in sync with the political fortunes of Donald Trump. What do underlying consumer price data suggest?

How Pimco and Blackrock bond funds use derivatives

19 November 2016ArticlesNick Dunbar

In December 2015, the Securities & Exchange Commission proposed new regulations on the use of derivatives by US registered investment companies. This article looks at the derivatives exposures of two large mutual funds.

The year of frontier debt

27 October 2016ArticlesEmerging marketsNick Dunbar

Emerging market bonds have outperformed most asset classes this year, prompting talk of a QE-induced bubble. But research into global inequality suggests a secular shift into emerging market debt makes sense.

How big mutual funds fail the SEC’s proposed derivatives cap

10 October 2016Asset Management, Financialscredit default swaps, derivatives, fund management, interest rate risk, mutual funds, regulation, risk models, Value-at-riskNick Dunbar

Many US mutual funds use derivatives, and now the SEC wants to limit this activity with notional limits and VaR-based tests. A case study of large Pimco and Blackrock funds shows how regulation of this murky area is overdue.

Inequality and the case for frontier debt

1 October 2016Markets, Sovereign (old version)EM external debt, Emerging markets, Emerging markets ex-Asia, government bonds, inequality, quantitative easingNick Dunbar

Close-out netting and safe harbours increase systemic risk

28 September 2016Research & presentationsNick Dunbar

The banking industry has long argued that close-out netting provisions in derivative contracts reduce systemic risk, and successfully lobbied to have 'safe harbour' provisions to protect counterparties from bankruptcy claims. This is embedded in US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, resulting in trillions of derivatives exposures not being counted on bank balance sheets. However the Lehman…

How the Fed’s physical commodity rule hits Goldman

22 September 2016Articles, Bankscommodity risk, Goldman SachsNick Dunbar

The Federal Reserve’s proposal to sharply raise capital requirements for bank physical commodity holdings puts Goldman Sachs on the spot and highlights the regulatory drive to rebuild barriers between banking and commerce.

The Taser and the choke lead: How the Fed restrains big banks

9 August 2016FinancialsCCAR, Dodd-Frank Act, Federal Reserve, JP Morgan, operational risk, operational RWAs, regulation, Stress testsNick Dunbar

Operational risk capital for US banks is the highest in the world but the Fed resists formally testing op risk in its stress tests. One reason might be that the Fed would have to explain why the charges need to be so high.

The Goldman-Greece files

30 July 2016Banks, SovereignNick Dunbar

15 years after it was signed, the Goldman-Greece swap continues to be a reputational problem for the bank. A longer feature that reviews a decade’s worth of unreported material on the story.

Brexit and the central banker’s dilemma

28 June 2016Markets, Sovereign (old version)Bank of England, Brexit, European Union, global, quantitative easingNick Dunbar

The UK’s shock Brexit vote increases the likelihood of more Bank of England gilt purchases. This article shows how the sovereign risk tool puts the Bank’s bond holdings in the context of other QE-dependent countries.

Steel and the pusillanimous pension rule

4 May 2016Industrials, News topicspensions, regulation, steelNick Dunbar

How pension policy cowardice helped doom Britain’s steel industry. Tata’s decision to write off the value of its UK steelmaking business and seek a quick sale, while keeping its Dutch business, is really a story about pension regulation.

Artificial intelligence: boom or bubble?

1 April 2016Articles, Technologyartificial intelligenceNick Dunbar

Artificial intelligence is booming and technology companies are pouring billions into AI research. But has AI really got to a take off point, and what does the history of the field have to tell us about the prospects for success?

Autogeddon

18 January 2016News topicsNick Dunbar

Just over two years ago, I took a train from Berlin to Wolfsburg, to visit a senior executive at Volkswagen. From the station platform the famous chimneys of VW’s vast car plant loomed up. Inside the gate, the company’s vehicles were everywhere, catching

Newham’s cracked crystal ball

10 November 2015Municipal FinanceBarclays, interest rate risk, LOBOs, local government, municipal finance, Newham councilNick Dunbar

Between July 2007 and November 2008, Newham council entered into 10 range LOBO loans with Barclays worth a total of £238.5 million. New information on the council’s controversial loan portfolio shows the impact of its relationship with Barclays, raising questions about risk management decisions.

Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World

13 October 2015Articles, Book Reviewsclimate change, historyNick Dunbar

by Gillen D'Arcy Wood (Princeton University Press 2014) In my last year at Harvard, before I decided to drop out of the PhD program and pursue other things, I took a graduate meteorology class. The class teacher, Brian Farrell, was doing what other professors did and quietly sounded students out about taking him on as…

Autogeddon

1 October 2015Industrials, News topicsBasel rules, carmakers, emissions, regulation, VolkswagenNick Dunbar

Just over two years ago, I took a train from Berlin to Wolfsburg, to visit a senior executive at Volkswagen. From the station platform the famous chimneys of VW's vast car plant loomed up. Inside the gate, the company's vehicles were everywhere, catching the sun like a metallic sea. It crossed my mind that it…

Borges, Babel and the race against the machine

8 April 2015Comment, Technologyeconomics, fiction, innovation, MathematicsNick Dunbar

In a world of information, the way we measure combinations of words or ideas is important. Some people say it might even save humanity. Last year, economists Eric Brynolfsson and Andrew McAfee suggested that increasing combinations of business ideas could save us from being supplanted by intelligent machines. Like any powerful algorithm, combinatorics is both…

Burning down the house

7 February 2015Structured productsCDOs, credit ratings, litigationNick Dunbar

Ten years after Lehman, nothing evokes the crisis better than the plunge in collateralised debt obligations that was a key indicator of systemic risk at the time. This article includes a visualisation of a unique ratings agency database that will be kept on this site as a matter of public record. They rated every deal,…

When the Old Lady slept: the Bank of England and the financial crisis

29 January 2015Markets, Sovereign (old version)Bank of England, central banking, financial crisis, transparencyNick Dunbar

Among those responsible for UK regulation during the financial crisis, the Bank of England came out of it rather well. The Treasury had to bail out the banks (and unlike its US counterpart, it hasn’t yet been paid back). The Financial Services Authority was disgraced and dismantled. The BOE on the other hand, emerged with an enlarged balance sheet and increased regulatory powers. It wasn’t until the Libor rigging scandal a couple of years ago that the record of the Bank’s senior management (former governor Mervyn King and his deputy Paul Tucker) was seriously questioned.

Most-read articles of 2014

31 December 2014UncategorizedNick Dunbar

Is the sharing economy a new form of regulatory arbitrage? That was the question posed by my most popular article this year. Published in January, my take on Uber turned out to be prescient, as the ride sharing company attracted increasing regulatory headwinds around the world. The second most-read new article is actually a pair…

House of Debt

18 December 2014Book Reviewsbanking, economics, lending, public policyNick Dunbar

The authors are experts at crunching microeconomic data on American borrowing patterns and uncovering explanations for what they see. Their starting point is the remarkable statistic for US household debt, which doubled to $14 trillion between 2000 and 2007. This build up of debt was responsible for the ensuing havoc because of its effect on borrowers, Mian and Sufi argue.

To understand this argument, consider mortgage borrowers versus those who invest in their mortgages via bank deposits. The borrowers tend to be poorer than the investors, who have spare cash. As Mian and Sufi put it, a poor man’s loan is a rich man’s asset.

However, the risk distribution is highly asymmetric because mortgage holders have a senior claim on property while the borrowers’ equity claim is junior, and gets wiped out first. When US house prices fell from late 2006 onwards, losses were concentrated among the poorest segment of the population who had levered exposure, while the richest segment ““ the savers ““ were cushioned.

That explains why inequality increased during the Great Recession, but Mian and Sufi don’t stop there. Using economic analysis that reads like a detective story, they show how the evaporation of poor peoples’ wealth led to a collapse in spending, effectively causing the Great Recession itself. To show causality, they point out that spending initially fell the most in areas of biggest housing wealth declines.

Niedrigzinsangst

29 October 2014Insurancecentral banks, deflation, government bonds, insurance, interest rate risk, Stress testsNick Dunbar

Why can't the ECB bring itself to stress test banks for deflation? I was thinking about this question when I remembered an episode from the past. Just over ten years ago, I took a train from Frankfurt to the sleepy spa town of Wiesbaden. It was the sort of place where a lone taxi is…

Lost Lobos

24 October 2014Municipal Financederivatives, Kent council, municipal finance, public policyNick Dunbar

For as long as most people can remember, UK municipal finance has been safe and boring. In the wild days of the 1980s, Hammersmith & Fulham council almost went bust speculating in derivatives, and was saved by a landmark House of Lords ruling. Since then, UK council borrowing has been tightly constrained by central government while derivative use has been banned.

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

23 September 2014Articles, Book Reviewscentral banking, regulationNick Dunbar

by Timothy F Geithner (Random House 2014) If you had perfect foresight and were going to pick the best regulator or policymaker capable of dealing with the global financial crisis and its aftermath, whom would you choose? You'd probably want someone with a track record of dealing directly with crises, perhaps in emerging markets, and…

The In/Out Question and European Spring

18 June 2014Book ReviewsEuropean Spring, Philippe LegrainNick Dunbar

The In/Out Question: Why Britain should stay in the EU and fight to make it better by Hugo Dixon (Kindle Single, 130pp) European Spring: Why our Economies and Politics are in a Mess and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain (Amazon print-on-demand, 448pp) As the May elections to its parliament showed, the…

Disruptive Business Models, Uber and Plane Crashes

30 January 2014Technologyinnovation, technology, transportation, UberNick Dunbar

Disruptive internet-based business models have upended traditional industries like recorded music, newspapers and retailing. The latest flurry of innovation involves start-ups that take a service traditionally provided by a regulated firm - such as a hotel or taxi company - transforming it into commission-paying transactions between buyers and sellers. Accessed via smartphone apps and 'regulated'…

Most-read articles of 2013

30 December 2013ArticlesNick Dunbar, web statisticsNick Dunbar

As the year ends, I thought it would be interesting to share with you the most-read articles on this website for 2013. Unsurprisingly, the review of Nassim Taleb's bookÂ Antifragile takes first place. Published just over a year ago, this review not only got the most views in the past year, but is the most-read article…

Confidence, Doubt and Climate Change

4 October 2013Articlesclimate change, physics, public policyNick Dunbar

24 years ago I was a graduate student studying earth and planetary science at Harvard. My advisor, Professor Mike McElroy, was an expert on atmospheric chemistry and I helped him teach a course to 300 undergrads in what was known as the 'core curriculum'. As a special treat for the students, McElroy invited his friend,…

Draghi Mythology and Eurozone Debt Costs

8 August 2013Markets, Sovereign (old version)central banks, eurozone, interest rates, sovereign debtNick Dunbar

What did European Central Bank President Mario Draghi achieve when he promised a year ago to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro? Back then, the yields on ten-year Italian and Spanish government bonds were around 7 percent, more than 5 percent higher than ten-year German bunds. Draghi warned about fragmenting markets and announced so-called open market transactions to buy peripheral government bonds if necessary.

The Higgs boson and me

18 July 2012CommentNick Dunbar, physicsNick Dunbar

I first encountered the Higgs boson in 1989 on a blackboard in an advanced quantum field theory class for graduate students at Harvard University. It was the point that I realized that the life of a theoretical physicist was not for me. I remember the lecture theatre well. There were three blackboards side by side,…

Déjà Vu All Over Again

8 August 2011Articlescentral banking, eurozone, sovereign debtNick Dunbar

Are we on the verge of another Lehman weekend? The crisis of September 2008 unfolded in several stages: 1) a long bubble in subprime and credit markets in general, in which Lehman and other banks profited from by increasing their balance sheet leverage, 2) following a realisation that subprime was a haven of fraudulent lending,…

The Devil’s Derivatives is published

12 July 2011ArticlesDevil's Derivatives, Nick DunbarNick Dunbar

In January 2008, I scribbled down some ideas for a book about what was then a crisis sparked by subprime mortgages, based on my decade of experience writing about financial derivatives. Three-and-a-half years later, the book has now been published. It was the feeling of being trapped inside history that prompted me to write the…

A vision for Europe and its discontents

10 May 2011Articlespublic policy, regulationNick Dunbar

Today, I participated in a panel discussion at the Economist Bellwether Europe conference on 'A Vision for Europe', together with Estonian finance minister JÃ¼rgen Ligi, head of markets at the UK Financial Services Authority Alexander Justham, and the chief executive of the Association for Financial Markets in Europe, Simon Lewis. Below are my answers to…

Nudge and Predictably Irrational

13 January 2010Articles, Book Reviewsbehavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Dan Ariely, Nudge, Predictably Irrational, Richard ThalerNick Dunbar

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein ( Yale University Press, 2008) Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (Harper Collins, 2008) Just over a year ago, I made a rough estimate of the size of my income tax bill that I would…

Corporate bonds dance to ...
This year's reversal in central bank sentiment has...
BNP Paribas piles on the ...
The French banking giant more than doubled its sec...
Europe’s negative yield...
Amounts of negative-yielding euro debt have surged...
The year that transformed...
Gauging the significance of the LOBO redemption wa...