Stressful times

IN FINANCE, things that grow very fast have an irksome tendency to blow up. American subprime mortgages prior to 2008, southern European sovereign debt in the run-up to 2010 and Japanese banks in the 1980s are but recent examples. So it is worrying that bank lending in emerging markets has ballooned in recent years, from about 77% of GDP in 2007 to 128% at the beginning of this year, according to JPMorgan Chase, a rich-world bank (see chart). That 51-percentage-point jump dwarfs the mere 20-point rise in credit in the rich world in 2002-07.

Now that the economic prospects of emerging markets have dimmed, banks from Shanghai to São Paulo are in the spotlight. Trouble in such places would once barely have registered in global financial circles. In 1990 only three of the world’s 100 biggest lenders by assets were in developing countries. Now the world’s four biggest banks are in China, and the fifth-biggest, HSBC, does much of its business from Hong Kong. More than a third of the world’s biggest banks have their headquarters in emerging markets, and plenty of rich-country firms (such as Standard Chartered, based in London, or BBVA, a Spanish bank)...Continue reading

from Economics http://ift.tt/1RpELTy
via IFTTT