By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Off-shore lending in US dollars has soared to $9 trillion and poses a growing risk to both emerging markets and the world's financial stability, the Bank for International Settlements has warned.
The Swiss-based global watchdog said dollar loans to Chinese banks and companies are rising at annual rate of 47pc. They have jumped to $1.1 trillion from almost nothing five years ago. Cross-border dollar credit has ballooned to $456bn in Brazil, and $381bn in Mexico. External debt has reached $715bn in Russia, mostly in dollars.
A chunk of China's borrowing is disguised as intra-firm financing. This replicates practices by German industrial companies in the 1920s, which hid their real level of exposure as the 1929 debt trauma was building up. "To the extent that these flows are driven by financial operations rather than real activities, they could give rise to financial stability concerns," said the BIS in its quarterly report.
... Some of the violent moves lately go beyond stress seen in earlier crises, a sign that markets may be dangerously stretched and that many fund managers do not really believe their own Goldilocks narrative....
The BIS said 55pc of collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) now being issued are based on leveraged loans, an "unprecedented level". This raises eyebrows because CDOs were pivotal in the 2008 crash.
"Activity in the leveraged loan markets even surpassed the levels recorded before the crisis: average quarterly announcements during the year to end-September 2014 were $250bn," it said. BIS officials are worried that tightening by the US Federal Reserve will transmit a credit shock through East Asia and the emerging world, both by raising the cost of borrowing and by pushing up the dollar.
"The appreciation of the dollar against the backdrop of divergent monetary policies may, if persistent, have a profound impact on the global economy. A continued depreciation of the domestic currency against the dollar could reduce the creditworthiness of many firms, potentially inducing a tightening of financial conditions," it said.
The dollar index (DXY) has surged 12pc since late June to 89.36, smashing through its 30-year downtrend line. The currency has risen 55pc against the Russian rouble and 18pc against Brazil's real over the same period.
Hyun Song Shin, the BIS's head of research, said the world's central banks still hold over 60pc of their reserves in dollars. This ratio has changed remarkably little in forty years, but the overall level has soared -- from $1 trillion to $12 trillion just since 2000.
Cross-border lending in dollars has tripled to $9 trillion in a decade. Some $7 trillion of this is entirely outside the American regulatory sphere. "Neither a borrower nor a lender is a US resident. The role that the US dollar plays in debt contracts is very important. It is a global currency, and no other currency has this role," he said.
The implication is that there is no lender-of-last resort standing behind trillions of off-shore dollar bank transactions. This increases the risks of a chain-reaction if it ever goes wrong. China's central bank has ample dollar reserves to bail out its companies - should it wish to do so - but the jury is out on Brazil, Russia, and other countries. ......
Yet the new threat may lie in non-leveraged investments by asset managers and pension funds funnelling vast sums of excess capital around the world, especially into emerging markets. Many of these are so-called "macro-tourists" chasing yield, in some cases with little grasp of global geopolitics.Studies suggest that they have a low tolerance for losses. They engage in clustering and crowd behaviours, and are apt to pull-out en masse, risking a bad feedback-loop. This could prove to be today's systemic danger......
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/...-edifice-warns-BIS.html
The $9 TRILLION Crash Your Broker Doesn't Even Know About
www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-08/...er-doesnt-even-know-about
The financial world focuses far too much on stocks. The stock market, despite being at record highs (meaning record market capitalizations) remains one of the smallest, and least sophisticated markets on the planet.
Consider that stocks, even at current lofty levels, have a global market capitalization of slightly over $60 trillion.
In contrast, the global bond market is well over $100 trillion.
And the global currency market trades OVER $5.3 trillion per day.
It is currencies, not stocks, where the most significant moves occur. The currency markets are the largest, most liquid markets in the world. They are always first to move when things change. Stocks are the DUMB money compared to currencies......