Guidelines for Computing Capital for Incremental Risk in the Trading Book

The Basel Committee/IOSCO Agreement reached in July 2005, contained several improvements to the capital regime for trading book positions. Among these revisions was a new requirement for banks that model specific risk to measure and hold capital against default risk that is incremental to any default risk captured in the bank’s value-at-risk (VaR) model. The incremental default risk charge was incorporated into the trading book capital regime in response to the increasing amount of exposure in banks’ trading books to creditrisk related and often illiquid products whose risk is not reflected in VaR. In October 2007, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (the Committee) released guidelines for computing capital for incremental default risk for public comments. At its meeting in March 2008, it reviewed comments received and decided to expand the scope of the capital charge.