Central banks around the world are increasingly resorting to more dovish monetary policies against a backdrop of slowing economic growth. Among the 38 central banks tracked by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 21 banks adopted interest rate cuts over the three-month period from July to September, compared to 13 during the same three-month period of 2018.
Aimed at supporting economic growth and inflation through prompting firms and households to spend more money now (instead of saving), these rates represent a source of risk within the banking sector and to global financial stability as a whole. Negative interest rates force banks to pay money to central banks for keeping their excess funds overnight. Even outside the negative territory, persistently low rates narrow banks' operating margins and can lead to the accumulation of excessive corporate debt.
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(29 April 2021) The volume of electricity consumed by bitcoin mining continues to grow globally, approaching the levels of energy consumption of some of the world's larger economies and bringing the environmental sustainability of the cryptocurrency into question. Tesla, which bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin in January, causing the price to surge to more than $55,000, became a target of bitcoin critics who say the step undermines the car company's environmental image. According to Digiconomist, a platform dedicated to exposing unintended consequences of digital trends, one...
The Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has released a database of the so-called Panama Papers - information leaked primarily from Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's leading global law firms providing services of incorporation of offshore entities and headquartered in Panama. The leak is the largest ever of offshore financial records and contains about 11.5 million legal and financial records dating back more than 40 years. The files expose more than 213,000 offshore entities created in 21 jurisdictions, stripping away the secrecy from...
In the 10 years since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, aka “Great Recession,” the global debt of the non-financial sector increased by 53 percent to reach $178 trillion in the third quarter of 2018, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Global debt, which represents the outstanding credit provided by domestic banks and other institutions to households, non-financial corporations, and government, is quite simply the driver of the modern economy. Over the 2008-2018 period, each percent of GDP growth in G20 countries required, on average, 1.6 percent of debt...
The leveraged loans* market in the US ballooned in 2018. According to the US Federal Reserve’s latest Financial Stability Report (May 2019), leveraged loans outstanding reached $1.15 trillion in the 4th quarter of 2018, a growth of 20.1 percent during 2018 alone. At the same time, deteriorating lending standards and investors’ growing risk appetite have increased funds available to indebted companies and created fresh vulnerability within the financial system. Why should this market be of such concern if it is a shadow of the size of other markets, such as residential and equities?...
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