A Framework for Stress Testing Banks’ Credit Risk

Macro stress testing refers to a range of techniques used to assess the vulnerability of a financial system to ‘exceptional but plausible’ macroeconomic shocks.2 Increasingly, macro stress testing plays an important role in the macro-prudential analysis of public authorities. The main objective is to identify structural vulnerability and overall risk exposures in a financial system that could lead to systemic problems. In conjunction with stress testing to assess the vulnerability of the portfolios of individual institutions, macro stress testing forms the main part of system-wide analysis, which measures the risk exposure of a group of financial institutions to a specific stress scenario. It can also serve as a tool for cross-checking results obtained by financial institutions’ internal models.