Inside Money: Global think-tank explains why debt is a downer

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I borrowed this link to a report on global debt from a Martin Wolf story in the Financial Times: cutting out the middleman should improve net information transmission efficiency.

The International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies (ICMB) report, titled Deleveraging? What deleveraging?, is a wide-ranging and lengthy analysis of current international debt dynamics.

It is not good news.

According to the report, post GFC - a crisis ultimately blamed on excessive leverage - the world hasn't really changed, debt-wise.

"Contrary to widely held beliefs, six years on from the beginning of the financial crisis in the advanced economies, the global economy is not yet on a deleveraging path," the study says. "Indeed, according to our assessment, the ratio of global total debt excluding financials over GDP (we do not have, at this stage, a reliable estimation of financial-sector debt in emerging economies) has kept increasing at an unabated pace and breaking new highs: up 38 percentage points since 2008 to 212 per cent."

While there's a plethora of detail showing regional differences in debt levels and so on, the overall message of the report is that we're all in debt up to our ears and we'll have to pay for it, one way or another.

The ICMB paper says despite clear evidence that out-of-whack debt levels eventually destabilise economies, government policies and regulations can only do so much to avert the next crisis.

"... financial crises are more about human nature," the ICMB report says. "Laws and regulations set the boundary to credit decisions, but financial innovation, charged by the prospect of capital gain, pushes out that frontier. Finance and leverage advances time and again to breaking point, often with significant consequences for economic activity."

However, the report provides plenty of prescriptions for top-down management of the problem, calling particularly for "a clear-eyed recognition of the actual debt capacity of a country is the best preventive measure to guard against excessive leverage and the formation of a crisis".

Easier said than done, of course, and the ICMB think-tank says governments and central banks will have a tricky time of it as the US Federal Reserve moves out of QE mode and into rate tightening formation.

According to the ICMB report, the developed world (that still includes NZ) has a choice between "prolonged low growth or another crisis".

Weird times ahead perhaps, but as the study says "the reality is that the events of the past few years have redefined the term 'unusual'".