Company: AGM-PH
Filing Date: 2025-11-03
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0000845877-25-000252
Chunk: 120

Company: FEDERAL AGRICULTURAL MORTGAGE CORP
Filing Date: 2025-11-03
Form: 10-Q
Item: Part I, Item 1
Chunk 120
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 than expected and the resulting cash flows must be reinvested in lower-yielding investments when Farmer Mac's funding costs cannot be correspondingly reduced. Alternatively, Farmer Mac could realize a decline in income if assets repay more slowly than originally forecasted and the associated maturing debt must be replaced by debt issuances at higher interest rates.

Interest Rate Risk Management

The goal of interest rate risk management at Farmer Mac is to manage the balance sheet in a manner that generates stable earnings and value across a variety of interest rate environments. Recognizing that interest rate sensitivities may change with the passage of time and as interest rates change, Farmer Mac regularly assesses this exposure and, if necessary, adjusts its portfolio of interest-earning assets, debt, and financial derivatives.

Farmer Mac seeks to maintain its exposure to interest rate risk within appropriate limits, as approved by Farmer Mac's board of directors. Farmer Mac's management-level Asset and Liability Committee ("ALCO") provides oversight, establishes guidelines, and approves strategies to maintain interest rate risk within the board-established limits.

Farmer Mac's primary strategy for managing interest rate risk is to fund asset purchases with debt that together with financial derivatives have similar duration and convexity characteristics and help mitigate 

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impacts from interest rate changes across the yield curve. As part of this strategy, Farmer Mac seeks to issue debt securities across a variety of maturities that together with financial derivatives closely align the forecasted debt and financial derivative cash flows with forecasted asset cash flows.

Farmer Mac issues discount notes and both callable and non-callable medium-term notes across a spectrum of maturities to execute its debt issuance strategy. Portions of Farmer Mac's callable debt is issued to mitigate prepayment risk associated with certain interest-earning assets held on balance sheet. In general, as interest rates decline, asset prepayments typically increase, and Farmer Mac may be able to economically extinguish certain callable debt issuances. In addition, Farmer Mac enters into financial derivatives, primarily interest rate swaps, to better match the durations of Farmer Mac's assets and liabilities, thereby reducing overall sensitivity to changing interest rates.

Taking into consideration the prepayment provisions and the default probabilities associated with its portfolio of interest-earning assets, Farmer Mac incorporates behavioral models when projecting and valuing cash flows associated with these assets. In recognition that borrowers' behaviors in various interest rate environments may change over time, Farmer Mac periodically evaluates the effectiveness of these models compared to actual prepayment experience and adjusts and refines the models as necessary to improve the precision of future prepayment forecasts.

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