Default Ambiguity: Finding the Best Solution to the Clearing Problem

Abstract

We study financial networks with debt contracts and credit default swaps between specific pairs of banks. Given such a financial system, we want to decide which of the banks are in default, and how much of their liabilities can these defaulting banks pay. There can easily be multiple different solutions to this problem, leading to a situation of default ambiguity, and a range of possible solutions to implement for a financial authority. In this paper, we study the properties of the solution space of such financial systems, and analyze a wide range of reasonable objective functions for selecting from the set of solutions. Examples of such objective functions include minimizing the number of defaulting banks, minimizing the amount of unpaid debt, maximizing the number of satisfied banks, and many others. We show that for all of these objectives, it is NP-hard to approximate the optimal solution to an n1−ϵ factor for any ϵ>0, with n denoting the number of banks. Furthermore, we show that this situation is rather difficult to avoid from a financial regulator’s perspective: the same hardness results also hold if we apply strong restrictions on the weights of the debts, the structure of the network, or the amount of funds that banks must possess. However, if we restrict both the network structure and the amount of funds simultaneously, then the solution becomes unique, and it can be found efficiently.