July 28, 2020
Across-the-Curve Credit Spread Indices
This note, prepared jointly with Darrell Duffie and Yichao Zhu, presents a preliminary approach to the design of an across-the-curve credit spread
index (AXI). The index is a measure of the recent average cost of wholesale unsecured debt funding for publicly listed U.S. bank holding companies and their commercial banking subsidiaries.
This may be a useful benchmark for bank lending and related derivatives risk management applications. The index is a weighted average of credit spreads for unsecured debt instruments with
maturities ranging from overnight to five years, with weights that reflect both transactions volumes
and issuance volumes.