PRMIA Exam 8010 Topic 1 Question 3 Discussion

The CCAR is a supervisory mechanism adopted by the US Federal Reserve Bank to assess capital adequacy for bank holding companies it supervises. It was not a concept introduced by the international Basel framework.

The other three were indeed rules introduced by Basel 2.5, which was ultimately subsumed into Basel III.

Stressed VaR is just the standard 99%/10 day VaR, calculated with the assumption that relevant market factors are under stress.

The Incremental Risk Charge (IRC) is an estimate of default and migration risk of unsecuritized credit products in the

trading book. (Though this may sound like a credit risk term, it relates to market risk - for example, a bond rated A being downgraded to BBB. In the old days, the banking book where loans to customers are held was the primary source of credit risk, but with OTC trading and complex products the trading book also now holds a good deal of credit risk. Both IRC and CRM account for these.)

While IRC considers only non-securitized products, the CRM (Comprehensive Risk Model) considers securitized products such as tranches, CDOs, and correlation based instruments.

The IRC, SVaR and CRM complement standard VaR by covering risks that are not included in a standard VaR model. Their results are therefore added to the VaR for capital adequacy determination.