Volume 34, Issue 3-4 - Special Issue: Systemic Risk: Data, Models and Metrics. Part 2. Guest Editors: Rama Cont and Michael Gordy

A proposal for applying network analysis to a foreign exchange (FX) settlement system is considered. In particular, network centrality metrics are used to analyse payments of financial institutions which settle through CLS Bank (CLS). Network centrality metrics provide a way to study settlement members’ connectivity, obtain a sense of their payments evolution with time, and measure their network topology variability. The analysis shows that although the continuous link settlement (CLS) network structure can be approximated with a power law degree distribution for many trade days, this is not always the case. A network community detection algorithm is applied to the FX settlement network to explore relationships between communities and to detect classification patterns in the FX trading net payments. A metric called SinkRank is used to build a ranking of the most systemic settlement risk important financial institutions trading on the FX system, and to understand how the metric depends on network’s connectivity. Since network metrics do not fully explain the dynamics of the settlement process, the CLS’ settlement system is simulated to measure the contagion of unsettled trades and its spread among network members. The effect of settlement failure and contagion on the settlement members is also explored.

This paper provides a framework for modeling the financial system with multiple illiquid assets when liquidation of illiquid assets is caused by failure to meet a leverage requirement. This extends the network model of [6] which incorporates a single asset with fire sales and capital adequacy ratio. This also extends the network model of [14] which incorporates multiple illiquid assets with fire sales and no leverage ratios. We prove existence of equilibrium clearing payments and liquidation prices for a known liquidation strategy when leverage requirements are required. We also prove sufficient conditions for the existence of an equilibrium liquidation strategy with corresponding clearing payments and liquidation prices. Finally, we calibrate network models to asset and liability data for 50 banks in the United States from 2007–2014 in order to draw conclusions on systemic risk as a function of leverage requirements.

The goal of this paper is to study organized flocking behavior and systemic risk in heterogeneous mean-field interacting diffusions. We illustrate in a number of case studies the effect of heterogeneity in the behavior of systemic risk in the system, i.e., the risk that several agents default simultaneously as a result of interconnections. We also investigate the effect of heterogeneity on the “flocking behavior” of different agents, i.e., when agents with different dynamics end up following very similar paths and follow closely the mean behavior of the system. Using Laplace asymptotics, we derive an asymptotic formula for the tail of the loss distribution as the number of agents grows to infinity. This characterizes the tail of the loss distribution and the effect of the heterogeneity of the network on the tail loss probability.