How the Fed’s Covid stress test got stuck in the middle

Experts fear CCAR add-on has neither informed investors nor guided capital management

What’s the purpose of a bank stress test? That might sound like an overly philosophical question in the middle of a global pandemic, but it’s the question that market participants, together with former and some current regulators, have ended up asking after the results of this year’s Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) were published in the US on June 25.

The original US public stress test in 2009 – the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP) – was intended to identify just