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.