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Asset-liability management
(ALM) is a term whose meaning has evolved. It is used in slightly
different ways in different contexts. ALM was pioneered by financial institutions, but
corporations now also apply ALM
techniques. This article describes ALM as a general concept, starting with more traditional
usage.
Traditionally, banks and insurance companies
used accrual accounting for essentially all their assets and liabilities.
They would take on liabilities, such as deposits, life insurance policies
or annuities. They would invest the proceeds from these liabilities in
assets such as loans, bonds or real estate. All assets and liabilities
were held at book value. Doing so disguised possible risks arising from
how the assets and liabilities were structured.
Consider a bank that borrows
USD 100MM at 3.00% for a year and lends
the same money at 3.20% to a highly-rated borrower for 5 years. For
simplicity, assume interest rates are
annually compounded and all interest
accumulates to the maturity of the respective obligations. The net
transaction appears profitable—the bank is earning a 20 basis point
spread—but it entails considerable risk. At the
end of a year, the bank will have to find new financing for the loan,
which will have 4 more years before it matures. If interest rates have
risen, the bank may have to pay a higher rate of interest on the new
financing than the fixed 3.20 it is earning on its loan.
Suppose, at the end of a year, an applicable 4-year interest rate is
6.00%. The bank is in serious trouble. It is going to be earning 3.20% on
its loan and paying 6.00% on its financing. Accrual accounting does not
recognize the problem. The book value of the loan (the bank's asset) is:
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100MM(1.032) = 103.2MM. |
[1] |
The book value of the financing (the bank's liability) is:
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100MM(1.030) = 103.0MM. |
[2] |
Based upon accrual accounting, the bank earned USD 200,000 in the first
year.
Market value accounting recognizes the bank's predicament. The respective
market values of the bank's asset and liability are:
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[3] |
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100MM(1.030) = 103.0MM. |
[4] |
From a market-value accounting standpoint, the bank has lost USD 10.28MM.
So which result offers a better portrayal of the bank' situation, the
accrual accounting profit or the market-value accounting loss? The bank is in trouble, and the
market-value loss reflects this. Ultimately, accrual accounting will
recognize a similar loss. The bank will have to secure financing for the
loan at the new higher rate, so it will accrue the as-yet unrecognized loss over the 4 remaining years of
the position.
The problem in this example was caused by a mismatch between assets and
liabilities. Prior to the 1970's, such mismatches tended not to be a
significant problem. Interest rates in developed countries experienced
only modest fluctuations, so losses due to asset-liability mismatches were
small or trivial. Many firms intentionally mismatched their balance
sheets. Because yield curves were generally upward sloping, banks could
earn a spread by borrowing short and lending long.
Things started to change in the 1970s, which ushered in a period of
volatile interest rates that continued into the early 1980s. US
regulation
Q, which had capped the interest rates that banks could pay depositors,
was abandoned to stem a migration overseas of the
market for USD deposits. Managers of many firms, who were accustomed to
thinking in terms of accrual accounting, were slow to recognize the
emerging risk. Some firms suffered staggering losses. Because the firms
used accrual accounting, the result was not so much bankruptcies as
crippled balance sheets. Firms gradually accrued the losses over the
subsequent 5 or 10 years.
One example is the US mutual life insurance company the Equitable.
During the early 1980s, the USD yield curve was inverted, with short-term interest rates spiking into the
high teens. The Equitable sold a number of long-term guaranteed interest
contracts (GICs)
guaranteeing rates of around 16% for periods up to 10 years. During this
period, GICs were routinely for principal of USD 100MM or more. Equitable invested the
assets short-term to earn the high interest rates guaranteed on the
contracts. Short-term interest rates soon came down. When the Equitable
had to reinvest, it couldn't get nearly the interest rates it was paying
on the GICs. The firm was crippled. Eventually, it had to demutualize and
was acquired by the Axa Group.
Increasingly, managers of financial firms focused on
asset-liability risk. The
problem was not that the value of assets might fall or that the value of
liabilities might rise. It was that
capital might be depleted by narrowing
of the difference between assets and liabilities—that the values of assets
and liabilities might fail to move in tandem. Asset-liability risk is
a leveraged form of risk. The capital of most financial institutions is
small relative to the firm's
assets or liabilities, so small percentage changes in assets or liabilities
can translate into large percentage changes in capital.
Exhibit 1 illustrates the evolution over time of a hypothetical
company's assets and liabilities. Over the period shown, the assets and
liabilities change only slightly, but those slight changes dramatically
reduce the company's capital (which, for the purpose of this example, is
defined as the difference between assets
and liabilities). In Exhibit 1, the capital falls by over 50%, a
development that would threaten almost any institution.
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Asset-liability risk is leveraged by the
fact that the values of assets and liabilities each tend to be
greater than the value of capital. In this example, modest
fluctuations in values of assets and liabilities result in a
50% reduction in capital. |
Accrual accounting could disguise the problem by deferring
losses into the future, but it could not solve the problem. Firms
responded by forming asset-liability management (ALM) departments to
assess asset-liability risk. They established ALM committees comprised of
senior managers to address
the risk.
Techniques for assessing asset-liability risk came to include
gap
analysis and duration analysis. These facilitated techniques of gap management and
duration matching of assets and liabilities. Both approaches worked well
if assets and liabilities comprised fixed cash flows.
Options, such as
those embedded in mortgages or callable debt, posed problems that gap
analysis could not address. Duration analysis could address these in
theory, but implementing sufficiently sophisticated duration measures was
problematic. Accordingly, banks and insurance companies also performed
scenario analysis.
With
scenario analysis,
several interest rate scenarios would be specified for the next 5 or 10
years. These might specify declining rates, rising rate's, a gradual
decrease in rates followed by a sudden rise, etc. Scenarios might specify the behavior of the entire yield curve, so there could
be scenarios with flattening yield curves, inverted yield curves, etc. Ten
or twenty scenarios might be specified in all. Next, assumptions would be
made about the performance of assets and liabilities under each scenario.
Assumptions might include prepayment rates on mortgages or surrender rates
on insurance products. Assumptions might also be made about the firm's
performance—the rates at which new business would be acquired for various
products. Based upon these assumptions, the performance of the firm's
balance sheet could be projected under each scenario. If projected
performance was poor under specific scenarios, the ALM committee might
adjust assets or liabilities to address the indicated exposure. A
shortcoming of scenario analysis is the fact that it is highly dependent
on the choice of scenarios. It also requires that many assumptions be made
about how specific assets or liabilities will perform under specific
scenarios.
In a sense, ALM was a substitute for market-value
accounting in a context of accrual accounting. It was a necessary
substitute because many of the assets and liabilities of financial
institutions could not—and still cannot—be marked to market. This spirit
of market-value accounting was not a complete solution. A firm can earn
significant mark-to-market profits but go bankrupt due to inadequate cash
flow. Some techniques of ALM—such as duration analysis—do not address
liquidity issues at all. Others are compatible with cash-flow
analysis. With minimal modification, a gap analysis can be used for cash
flow analysis. Scenario analysis can easily be used to assess
liquidity
risk.
Firms recognized a potential for liquidity risks to be
overlooked in ALM analyses. They also recognized that many of the tools
used by ALM departments could easily be applied to assess liquidity risk.
Accordingly, the assessment and management of liquidity risk became a
second function of ALM departments and ALM committees. Today, liquidity
risk management is generally considered a part of ALM.
ALM has evolved since the early 1980's. Today, financial
firms are increasingly using market-value accounting for certain business
lines. This is true of universal banks that have trading operations. For
trading books, techniques of market risk management—value-at-risk (VaR),
market risk limits, etc.—are more appropriate than techniques of ALM. In
financial firms, ALM is associated with those assets and liabilities—those
business lines—that are accounted for on an accrual basis. This includes
bank lending and deposit taking. It includes essentially all traditional
insurance activities.
Techniques of ALM have also evolved. The growth of
OTC
derivatives markets have facilitated a variety of hedging strategies. A
significant development has been
securitization, which allows firms to
directly address asset-liability risk by removing assets or liabilities from their balance sheets. This not only eliminates asset-liability risk; it also frees up
the balance sheet for new business.
The scope of ALM activities has widened. Today, ALM
departments are addressing (non-trading) foreign exchange risks and other
risks. Also, ALM has extended to non-financial firms.
Corporations have adopted techniques of ALM to address interest-rate
exposures, liquidity risk and foreign exchange risk. They are using
related techniques to address commodities risks. For example, airlines'
hedging of fuel prices or manufacturers' hedging of steel prices are often
presented as ALM.
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capital
A firm's value—assets minus liabilities.
corporate risk
management Practices that serve to optimize risk taking in a context of
book value accounting.
duration
and convexity Factor sensitivities often used in
asset-liability management.
economic capital
Capital held for economic (as opposed to regulatory) purposes.
economic
profit Profit in excess of the opportunity cost of capital.
financial
risk management Practices by which a firm optimizes the
manner in which it takes financial risk.
fixed income
term structure Refers collectively to a spot curve, forward curve,
discount curve, yield curve or any other curve that describes the time value of
money at a particulate point in time.
gap analysis
A technique of asset-liability management used to assess interest rate risk or
liquidity risk.
interest rate risk
Risk due to uncertain future interest rates.
interest rate spreads
An
overview.
leverage Debt financing or anything that can similarly magnify the risk
and reward of an investment.
liquidity
Used in various senses, all relating to availability of, access to, or
convertibility into cash.
off-balance
sheet financing Financing that doesn't appear on a firm's
balance sheet.
option-adjusted spread
Yield spread not attributable to embedded options.
reinvestment
risk Risk from uncertainty in the interest rate at which
future cash flows may be invested.
scenario analysis
Formalized "what if" analysis typically performed as a part of asset-liability management
or corporate risk management.
securitization
The process of pooling assets and selling interests in the pool to
investors.
valuation Article about book value and market value accounting.
yield
Any of several metrics of the income or return to be earned from an investment. |
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Books tend to focus on asset-liability
management (ALM) in the context of commercial banks and other
depository institutions. This is the case with the following
books.
Dermine and Bissada (2002)
is a wonderful overview text that will appeal to anyone who is new
to ALM. Marrison (2002)
discusses techniques of ALM in the context of financial risk
management and is excellent for junior or mid-level risk
management staff. Although somewhat dated, Uyemura and Van
Deventer (1993)
remains an outstanding, very popular book on ALM for senior
managers or board members. Van Deventer, Imai and Mesler (2004)
is a wonderfully sophisticated book on ALM and risk management in
banks. I recommend it to anyone, but especially to more experienced
professionals or board members.
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