"For most of October, the index was at levels in excess of 7.1%, but the rise in stock prices toward the end of the month restored the troubled company index to its end-of-September level," said Warren Sherman, Kamakura President and Chief Operating Officer. "The number of companies with default probabilities between 1% and 5% was 5.2% of the global public company universe in October, up 0.1% from September. Companies with default probabilities between 5 and 10% remained steady at 1.0% of the universe. The percentage of companies with default probabilities between 10% and 20% declined in October by 0.1% to 0.5% of the universe. The number of global companies with default probabilities over 20% remained at 0.3% of the universe at the end of October."

Beginning in January 2006, Kamakura has moved to a global index covering 29 countries using the annualized one month default probability produced by the best performing credit model of the Kamakura Risk Information Services default and correlation service. The model used is the fourth generation Jarrow-Chava reduced form default probability, a formula that bases default predictions on a sophisticated combination of financial ratios, stock price history, and macro-economic factors. The countries currently covered by the index include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxemburg, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Kamakura is offering free trials of its KRIS default probability and default correlation service to qualified institutions. For more information on Kamakura's free trial offer please contact Kamakura at info@kamakuraco.com. More information can also be found on the Kamakura Corporation web site www.kamakuraco.com and in "Advanced Financial Risk Management" (John Wiley & Sons, 2004) by Kamakura's van Deventer, Kenji Imai, and Mark Mesler (available on www.amazon.com ).

About Kamakura Corporation

Kamakura Corporation is a leading provider of risk management information, processing and software. Kamakura has been a provider of daily default probabilities and default correlations for listed companies since November 2002. Kamakura launched its business mortality model for unlisted companies in January 2004. Kamakura is also the first company in the world to develop and install a fully integrated enterprise risk management system that analyzes credit risk, market risk, asset and liability management, and transfer pricing software system. Kamakura has served more than 150 clients ranging in size from $3 billion in assets to $1.6 trillion in assets. Kamakura's risk management products are currently used in 23 countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, Japan, China, Korea and many other countries in Asia.