So you thought the world was deleveraging after the housing and derivatives bubble of 2008, hey?
Well...fooled you!
Global debt-to-GDP is now at a comfortable record high and the Bank for International Settlements, aka the central bank of central banks, noted on Friday that over the last 16 years, debts of governments, households and corporations has gone up...everywhere.
In the U.S., debt is up 63%. The Eurozone, Japan, U.K., Canada and Australia average around 52%. And emerging markets, led by China, leverage is up 85%. In some important emerging economies like Brazil major cities are on the verge of bankruptcy. Rio is CCC credit thanks to mismanagement of a deep sea oil bonanza and over spending on the FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.
"The next financial crisis is likely to revolve around how this debt burden is managed," warns Neil MacKinnon, an economist with VTB Capital in London. "In the U.K., most crises are related to boom and busts in the housing market, where there is an approximate 18-year cycle suggesting that the next bust will be in 2025."
That's quite a ways away. And for London real estate, they always have the Saudis, the Russians and the Chinese to save them.
But further south, in countries like France and Italy, credit downgrades are expected. And guess which southern European country is back to give us all headaches again? Greece! Greece is making headlines once more for its inability to work out a debt deal with its lenders. There is now a rift between the European Union and the International Monetary Fund over Greek debt sustainability. Most of the debt is with the European Commission itself, so German policy makers are basically the lenders and so far are not willing to take a haircut on bond prices. The IMF predicts that the Greek debt-GDP ratio, now at 180%, will soar to 275% all the while primary fiscal surplus is currently at zero. That means Greece's debt to GDP is like Japan, only without the power of the Japanese economy to back it up. Greece is broke.
"Greece is caught in a debt-trap which has shrunk the Greek economy by 25%," notes MacKinnon. They own Europe around 7 billion euros in July. Good luck with that.
Jaime Caruana, General Manager for the Bank for International Settlements hinted in a speech in Brussels on Monday that the core central banks might not know what they're in for.
"We need to escape the popular models that prevent us from recognizing the build-up of vulnerabilities," Caruana said. "Getting all the right dots in front of you does not really help if you do not connect the dots. Right now, I worry that even though we have data on aggregate debt, we are not properly connecting the dots and we are underestimating the risks, particularly when the high levels of debt are aggravated by weak productivity growth in many countries. The standard of evidence for precautionary action has to be the preponderance of evidence, not evidence beyond a shadow of doubt. Waiting for fully compelling evidence is to act too late."
