An Introduction to Credit Risk Management

What is credit risk? Why is it so important, in modern economies, to correctly deal with it? This course combines theory with practice to answer these questions.

About this Course

You are a bank and a big part of your daily business is to lend money. Unfortunately for you, lending money is definitely a risky activity: there is no 100% guarantee that you will get all your money back. For example you may expect losses in your portfolio because of the default of your counterpart. Or, in a less extreme situation, the credit quality of your counterpart may deteriorate according to some rating system, so that your loan becomes more and more risky. These are typical situations in which credit risk manifests itself.

According to the Basel Agreements, credit risk is one of the three fundamental risks, together with market risk and operational risk, a bank (or another regulated financial institution) has to face when operating on the markets.

As the 2008 financial crisis has shown us, a correct understanding of credit risk and the ability to cope with it are fundamental in the world of today.

The aim of this course is to provide an introduction to credit risk modeling and hedging. At the end of the course, the students will be able to understand and correctly use the basic tools of credit risk management, both from a theoretical and, most of all, a practical point of view.

This will be a quite unconventional course. For every methodology, we will analyze its points of strengths, but we will also stress its points of weakness. We will try to do this in a rigorous way, but also with fun.

In addition to the video lectures and exercises, recent economic developments will be discussed in the forum based on news articles, and key practitioners from the financial world will share their views through interviews.

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