Stress Testing: Past, Present and Future

Here from Cristian deRitis, deputy chief economist at Moody’s analytics, about the evolution of stress testing, current trends, and the biggest challenges facing banks and regulators.

Regulatory stress tests play a vital role in ensuring that large banks hold enough capital to withstand extreme recessions, while internal stress tests at banks are used for everything from capital and liquidity planning to risk monitoring, risk identification and operational resilience.

The 2023 failures of a group of mid-sized U.S. banks, however, have led some critics to question whether the Federal Reserve’s annual stress test is broad enough, comprehensive enough and sufficiently proactive – particularly with respect to emerging threats and rare tail risks. Globally, meanwhile, we’ve seen stress testing expand beyond capital and liquidity and into areas like climate risk, which has created a whole new set of hurdles for regulators and banks.

In the future, to address perceived flaws, it’s feasible that we could see a broadening of regulatory stress tests and changes to central banks’ approaches to scenarios. Banks, meanwhile, may consider increasing the frequency of their internal tests and expanding their use of AI models to rapidly factor in a wider array of scenarios.

Relevant Links:

GARP Benchmarking Initiative

Modeling Risk (Risk Intelligence column by Cristian deRitis)

 

Speaker’s Bio

Cristian deRitis is Managing Director and Deputy Chief Economist at Moody's Analytics. As the head of econometric model research and development, he specializes in the analysis of current and future economic conditions, scenario design, consumer credit markets and housing. In addition to his published research, Cristian is a co-host on the popular Inside Economics Podcast. He can be reached at cristian.deritis@moodys.com.