This series aims to provide the reader with an overview of the main elements of analysing bank and country risk, examining specialised sectors such as bank risk, bank financial analysis, bank qualitative analysis, bank ratings criteria, country risk analysis, and country risk models. When you have completed the workbook, you should have a good understanding of the importance of bank and country risk in international banking. You will be well prepared for other, more in depth studies on bank and country risk, country risk assessment and management. The subject of bank and country risk, understanding it, and assessing it, quantitatively and qualitatively, has attained an importance for bankers, regulators and investors that has increased dramatically over recent years and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Bank mergers, resulting in larger banks (and thus increased risk concentration) further stimulates the need to understand the risks inherent in these entities, their operating environment and management culture, and the risks involved in dealing with them as trading counterparties. What has driven this and what will continue to do so? Problems of country defaults, deregulation of financial markets, increased competition within local and across international boundaries, mergers and megamergers, and the failure of major banks on an unprecedented scale threatening to destabilise the global economy have been the main catalysts for this increased need to know. The Bank and Country Risk Analysis workbook will enable you to: - Understand more fully bank/country risk and their impact on economies as well as your business. - Understand the key factors impacting banking systems stability. - Interpret and analyse the financial information on banks taking into account differing accounting regimes and regulatory factors. - Appreciate the nature of different types of financial institutions and their risk profile. - Rate banks financial strength and resources and translate this into counter=party limits. - Understand the importance of country risk in bank risk analysis. - Evaluate both the economic and political risk factors in sovereign and cross border lending or investment. - Build an appropriate country risk model for your particular requirements. - Evaluate early warning signals for determining country risk and so manage country risk limits. Country Risk Modelling: developing short and medium term risk models; alternative models, discussions of existing models, exercises, building your own model, identifying and managing early warning signals. Topics covered include: Building a Country risk model. How to make comparisons between indicators? The link between a credit score and a country limit. Short and medium term models. Early warning signals. A model bank model. The development of ratings. Sovereign Ratings.