Stress-Testing in a Lucky Country

Use regression models of the 30+-days, approach commonly used in banking
Standard models would have underestimated the extent of the credit losses, often significantly
Need to leverage some sort of external crisis in order to give an accurate reflection of likely stressed performance
Benchmark how Australia’s mortgagors would perform given severe macroeconomic difficulty
Result: Stressed delinquency rates for the Australia from models calibrated to US data are significantly higher than those estimated from Australian data alone
A very high proportion of mortgages are kept on the bank’s books in Australia relative to other countries (62% vs 40% in US or 32% in CH, 23% in NL)
The standards approach to stress testing involves finding some data on credit performance, modeling it as a function of economic variables, then forecasting under various stressed scenarios
Delinquency is significantly underestimated using pre-crisis data in the US
Modeling three key elements: the maturation effect, the time effect, the vintage effect
Use current employment rate lags, annual change in house prices, unemployment rate at origination
They suppose that new pools are created over the forecast horizon at the same rate as they have been over the past 24 months
Correlation and feedback mechanisms that drive activity are likely to shift during severe recessions
Recessions associated with banking crises and large falls in house prices such envisaged are quite distinct and much worse than garden variety recessions
The lesson of the US crisis are that using economic and credit performance feedbacks benchmarked on sunny economic times will tend to give overly optimistic projections which are found wanting when the storms clouds hit

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