Fight Finance

A wholesale vitamin supplements store offers credit to its customers. Customers are given 30 days to pay for their goods, but if they pay within 5 days they will get a 1% discount.

What is the effective interest rate implicit in the discount being offered? Assume 365 days in a year and that all customers pay on either the 5th day or the 30th day. All of the below answer choices are given as effective annual interest rates.

Bonds X and Y are issued by different companies, but they both pay a semi-annual coupon of 10% pa and they have the same face value ($100), maturity (3 years) and yield (10%) as each other.

Which of the following statements is true?

In the so called 'Swiss Loans Affair' of the 1980's, Australian banks offered loans denominated in Swiss Francs to Australian farmers at interest rates as low as 4% pa. This was far lower than interest rates on Australian Dollar loans which were above 10% due to very high inflation in Australia at the time.

In the late-1980's there was a large depreciation in the Australian Dollar. The Australian Dollar nearly halved in value against the Swiss Franc. Many Australian farmers went bankrupt since they couldn't afford the interest payments on the Swiss Franc loans because the Australian Dollar value of those payments nearly doubled. The farmers accused the banks of promoting Swiss Franc loans without making them aware of the risks.

What fundamental principal of finance did the Australian farmers (and the bankers) fail to understand?

In the Merton model of corporate debt, buying a levered company's debt is equivalent to buying risk free government bonds and:

A risky firm will last for one period only (t=0 to 1), then it will be liquidated. So it's assets will be sold and the debt holders and equity holders will be paid out in that order. The firm has the following quantities:

##V## = Market value of assets.

##E## = Market value of (levered) equity.

##D## = Market value of zero coupon bonds.

##F_1## = Total face value of zero coupon bonds which is promised to be paid in one year.

The risky corporate debt graph above contains bold labels a to e. Which of the following statements about those labels is NOT correct?

A pharmaceutical firm has just discovered a valuable new drug. So far the news has been kept a secret.

The net present value of making and commercialising the drug is $200 million, but $600 million of bonds will need to be issued to fund the project and buy the necessary plant and equipment.

The firm will release the news of the discovery and bond raising to shareholders simultaneously in the same announcement. The bonds will be issued shortly after.

Once the announcement is made and the bonds are issued, what is the expected increase in the value of the firm's assets (ΔV), market capitalisation of debt (ΔD) and market cap of equity (ΔE)?

The triangle symbol is the Greek letter capital delta which means change or increase in mathematics.

Ignore the benefit of interest tax shields from having more debt.

Remember: ##ΔV = ΔD+ΔE##

If a variable, say X, is normally distributed with mean ##\mu## and variance ##\sigma^2## then mathematicians write ##X \sim \mathcal{N}(\mu, \sigma^2)##.

If a variable, say Y, is log-normally distributed and the underlying normal distribution has mean ##\mu## and variance ##\sigma^2## then mathematicians write ## Y \sim \mathbf{ln} \mathcal{N}(\mu, \sigma^2)##.

The below three graphs show probability density functions (PDF) of three different random variables Red, Green and Blue.

Select the most correct statement:

In the home loan market, the acronym LVR stands for Loan to Valuation Ratio. If you bought a house worth one million dollars, partly funded by an $800,000 home loan, then your LVR was 80%. The LVR is equivalent to which of the following ratios?

Which of the following statements about an asset’s standard deviation of returns is NOT correct? All other things remaining equal, the higher the asset’s standard deviation of returns: