When roll-overs do not qualify as numéraire: bond markets beyond short rate paradigms

Abstract

We investigate default-free bond markets where the standard relationship between a possibly existing bank account process and the term structure of bond prices is broken, i.e. the bank account process is not a valid numéraire. We argue that this feature is not the exception but rather the rule in bond markets when starting with, e.g., terminal bonds as numéraires.Our setting are general càdlàg processes as bond prices, where we employ directly methods from large financial markets. Moreover, we do not restrict price process to be semimartingales, which allows for example to consider markets driven by fractional Brownian motion. In the core of the article we relate the appropriate no arbitrage assumptions (NAFL), i.e. no asymptotic free lunch, to the existence of an equivalent local martingale measure with respect to the terminal bond as numéraire, and no arbitrage opportunities of the first kind (NAA1) to the existence of a supermartingale deflator, respectively. In all settings we obtain existence of a generalized bank account as a limit of convex combinations of roll-over bonds.Additionally we provide an alternative definition of the concept of a numéraire, leading to a possibly interesting connection to bubbles. If we can construct a bank account process through roll-overs, we can relate the impossibility of taking the bank account as numéraire to liquidity effects. Here we enter endogenously the arena of multiple yield curves.The theory is illustrated by several examples.1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. 60H30, 91G30. Key words and phrases. large financial markets, bond markets, interest rate theory, forward measure, short rate, bubble, numeraire.The authors thank ETH Foundation for its support of this research project. The first and second author thank the Forschungsinstitut Mathematik at ETH Zürich for its generous hospitality.