Portfolio Correlations in the Bank-Firm Credit Market of Japan

The recent global financial crisis has shown portfolio correlations between agents as one of the major channels of risk contagion and amplification. In this work, we analyse the structure and dynamics of the cross-correlation matrix of banks’ loan portfolios in the yearly bank-firm credit network of Japan during the period from 1980 to 2012. Using the methods of Random Matrix Theory (RMT), Principal Component Analysis and complex networks, we aim to detect non-random patterns in the empirical cross-correlations as well as to identify different states of such correlations over time. Our findings suggest that although a majority of portfolio correlations between banks in lending relations to firms are contributed by noise, the top largest eigenvalues always deviate from the random bulk explained by RMT, indicating the presence of non-random patterns governing the correlation dynamics. In particular, we show that this dynamics is mainly driven by a global common factor and a couple of “groups” factors. Furthermore, different states in the credit market can be identified based on the evolution of eigenvalues and associated eigenvectors. For example, during the asset price bubble period in Japan from 1986 to 1991, we find that banks’ loan portfolios tend to be more correlated, showing a significant increase in the level of systemic risk in the credit market. In addition, building Planar Maximally Filtered Graphs from the correlations of different eigenmodes, notably, we observe that the local interaction structure between banks changes in different periods. Typically, when the dominance of a group of banks in one period gradually vanishes, the credit market starts to build-up a different structure in the next period in which another group of banks will become the main actors in the backbone of the cross-correlations.