In: Finance
The current 1-year spot rate on a treasury bill is 4.25% and the current 1-year spot rate on a BB-rated bond of equivalent risk to a prospective loan is 11.55%. The bond has a marginal probability of default in year 2 of 8.5% 11. What is the marginal probability of default in year 1? (3 points) 12. What is the cumulative probability of default over the 2 years? (4 points)
11
The formula to calculate marginal probability of default is given as:
Where is the risk free rate
or spot rate on treasury bill and
is the spot rate on
risky asset. This formula is derived by assuming that an investor
would be indifferent between return on a risky asset multiplied by
its probability of repayment (which is equal to 1 - probability of
default) and return on a risk less asset.
Substituting values given in the question, we get:
which is equal to 0.0654 or 6.54%
12
The formula to calculate cumulative probability of default is:
Where and
are marginal
probabilities of default in years 1 and 2 respectively. The
intuitive sense of the formula is that we are trying to calculate
the cumulative probability of repayment by multiplying
probabilities of repayment in both years 1 and 2 and then we are
subtracting that from 1 to calculate cumulative probability of
default.
plugging in the values we get
or 14.48%