In finance and economics, systematic risk (in economics often called aggregate risk or undiversifiable risk) is vulnerability to events which affect aggregate outcomes such as broad market returns, total economy-wide resource holdings, or aggregate income. In many contexts, events like earthquakes, epidemics and major weather catastrophes pose aggregate risks that affect not only the distribution but also the total amount of resources. That is why it is also known as contingent risk, unplanned risk or risk events.

1. Interest rate changes are the main source of risk for fixed income securities such as bonds and debentures.
2. But an investor can help brace themselves against systematic risk by ensuring their portfolio contains many different types of asset classes, such as stocks, real estate, even a fixed income investment like treasury bonds.
3. For countries or regions lacking access to broad hedging markets, events like earthquakes and adverse weather shocks can also act as costly aggregate risks.
4. While the U.S. government did not bail out Lehman, it decided to bail out AIG with loans of more than $180 billion, preventing the company from going bankrupt.
5. The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, fully known as Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, introduced an enormous set of new laws that are supposed to prevent another Great Recession from occurring by tightly regulating key financial institutions to limit systemic risk.

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The Beta of a stock or portfolio measures the volatility of the instrument compared to the overall market volatility. It is used as a proxy for the systematic risk of the stock, and it can be used to measure how risky a stock is relative to the market risk. When used as a proxy to measure systematic risk, the β value of a portfolio can have the following interpretation. Inflation erodes the purchasing power of money, i.e., the same amount of money can buy fewer goods and services due to an increase in prices. Therefore, if an investor’s income does not increase in times of rising inflation, then the investor is actually getting lower income in real terms.

Systemic risk of a portfolio is estimated as the weighted average of the beta coefficients of individual investments. Systematic risk cannot be eliminated through simple diversification because it affects the entire market, but it can be managed to some effect through hedging strategies. Fixed income securities are subject to a high level of purchasing power risk because income from such securities is fixed in nominal terms.

What is Systematic Risk?

This ripple effect can then push the entire system or market into bankruptcy or collapse. Systematic risk is indicative of a larger factor that affects either the entire market or a sector of the market. This type of risk includes natural disasters, weather events, inflation, changes in interest rates and even socioeconomic issues like war or even terrorism. Modelers often incorporate aggregate risk through shocks to endowments (budget constraints), productivity, monetary policy, or external factors like terms of trade. Idiosyncratic risks can be introduced through mechanisms like individual labor productivity shocks; if agents possess the ability to trade assets and lack borrowing constraints, the welfare effects of idiosyncratic risks are minor.

The Paradox of Systemic Risk

To help manage systematic risk, investors should ensure that their portfolios include a variety of asset classes, such as fixed income, cash, and real estate, each of which will react differently in the event of a major systemic change. An increase in interest rates, for example, will make some new-issue bonds more valuable, while causing some company stocks to decrease in price as investors perceive executive teams to be cutting back on spending. In the event of an interest rate rise, ensuring that a portfolio incorporates ample income-generating securities will mitigate the loss of value in some equities. The risk that arises from unique factors is called unique risk or unsystematic risk.

This period vividly illustrates the nature of systematic risk, where the entire financial market is subject to the effects of widespread economic challenges, affecting investments across the board. But it also shows that there can be relationships between systematic and systemic risks, where an economic slowdown causes problems in a firm or industry, which then spark panic, spreading out to threaten the global economy. Another systematic risk often mentioned is climate change, which will affect economies and markets, policies, operational costs, real estate, commodity prices, and far more worldwide. To address the challenges of systematic risk, e.g., with climate looming, investors might incorporate a variety of asset classes into their portfolios, including equities, fixed income, cash, and real estate, because each of these will react differently to a major systematic change. Meanwhile, unsystematic or idiosyncratic risks are hazards specific to a firm or industry and can be reduced or eliminated through diversification.

Dot-Com Bubble Example: Stock Market Collapse (

These institutions are large relative to their respective industries or make up a significant part of the overall economy. Systemic risk should not be confused with systematic risk; systematic risk relates to the entire financial system. Systematic risk is that part of the total risk that is caused by factors beyond the control of a specific company or individual.

However, systematic risk incorporates interest rate changes, inflation, recessions, and wars, among other major changes. Shifts in these domains can affect the entire market and cannot be mitigated by changing positions within a portfolio of public equities. However, during the financial crisis, a small number of quasi-banking activities conducted by insurers either caused failure or triggered significant difficulties. The report therefore identifies two activities which, when conducted on a widespread scale without proper risk control frameworks, have the potential for systemic relevance.

If price risk is negative (i.e., fall in price), reinvestment risk would be positive (i.e., increase in earnings on reinvested money). Interest rate changes are the main source of risk for fixed income systematic risk meaning securities such as bonds and debentures. Fed flooding the capital markets with money to calm investors down and prevent a free fall in the financial markets as part of the crisis control.

Therefore, one can sum up all the Clayton Copula parameters, and the higher the sum of these parameters, the greater the impending likelihood of systemic risk. The traditional analysis for assessing the risk of required government intervention is the “too big to fail” test (TBTF). TBTF can be measured in terms of an institution’s size relative to the national and international marketplace, market share concentration (using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index for example), and competitive barriers to entry or how easily a product can be substituted.

Systemic risk typically involves a cascading set of dangers that multiply and could soon engulf a sector or economy because of how the modern economy is so interconnected, not just in this or that region or country, but across the world. Mitigating the risk of the initial spark is easier than trying to control what happens once the disaster gets rolling. Although some companies are considered “too big to fail,” they will if the government does not intervene during turbulent economic times. Over 1.8 million professionals use CFI to learn accounting, financial analysis, modeling and more.

Systemic risk often stems from a company or industry-level event that could spark a broad collapse. Conversely, systematic risk is inherent to the entire market, influenced by various economic, sociopolitical, and market-related factors. Investors (private or institutional) should prepare as much as possible for both. While specific risks can be reduced through diversification, systemic and systematic risks pose broader threats that are more formidable because of their widespread impact on the financial system and the market as a whole. Systemic risk is when a single company or sector failure could trigger an economic crisis, like a match that, once lit, threatens to burn a whole building down. By contrast, systematic risk involves pervasive threats like economic recessions, geopolitical unrest, or natural disasters—akin to the ever-present possibility of a storm knocking your house down.

Another approach is to use hedging strategies to reduce and eliminate systematic risk. For example, a hedge fund with investments in equity investments may short sell the broad market index. The negative position in the broad market index may cancel out the systematic risk that results from positive position in individual equity investments. Systemic risk is the risk that a company-level event could destabilize an entire industry. During the financial crisis of 2008, many companies deemed “too big to fail” did just that. Systemic risk is also a risk imposed by interconnected organizations where the failure of one organization within a system or market can cause a ripple effect.

Systemic risk should not be confused with market or price risk as the latter is specific to the item being bought or sold and the effects of market risk are isolated to the entities dealing in that specific item. This kind of risk can be mitigated by hedging an investment by entering into a mirror trade. CFA Institute sponsors the Systemic Risk Council (SRC), composed of US and European market leaders, academics, https://1investing.in/ and former policymakers. As sponsor of the SRC, CFA Institute actively monitors and encourages regulatory reform of systemic risk detection and mitigation in US capital markets, particularly in the areas of bank capital requirements, money market reform, and funding for financial regulators. However, there are times when the federal government sits idle instead of intervening with a large company.

Systematic or aggregate risk arises from market structure or dynamics which produce shocks or uncertainty faced by all agents in the market; such shocks could arise from government policy, international economic forces, or acts of nature. As a result, assets whose returns are negatively correlated with broader market returns command higher prices than assets not possessing this property. In the fields of project management and cost engineering, systemic risks include those risks that are not unique to a particular project and are not readily manageable by a project team at a given point in time. They are caused by micro or internal factors i.e. uncertainty resulting from attributes of the project system/culture.