Interest Rate Risk

Interest rate risk analysis is almost always based on simulating movements in one or more yield curves using the Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework to ensure that the yield curve movements are both consistent with current market yield curves and such that no riskless arbitrage is possible. The Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework was developed in the early 1991 by David Heath of Cornell University, Andrew Morton of Lehman Brothers, and Robert A. Jarrow of Kamakura Corporation and Cornell University.

There are a number of standard calculations for measuring the impact of changing interest rates on a portfolio consisting of various assets and liabilities. The most common techniques include:

  1. Marking to market, calculating the net market value of the assets and liabilities, sometimes called the "market value of portfolio equity"
  2. Stress testing this market value by shifting the yield curve in a specific way.
  3. Calculating the Value at Risk of the portfolio
  4. Calculating the multiperiod cash flow or financial accrual income and expense for N periods forward in a deterministic set of future yield curves
  5. Doing step 4 with random yield curve movements and measuring the probability distribution of cash flows and financial accrual income over time.
  6. Measuring the mismatch of the interest sensitivity gap of assets and liabilities, by classifying each asset and liability by the timing of interest rate reset or maturity, whichever comes first.

Famous quotes containing the words interest, rate and/or risk:

    The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
    William Hazlitt (1778–1830)

    I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf—at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    The risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her “job” is that the children’s growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother’s indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result.
    Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)