Sounding the Alarm on Leveraged Lending
By Tobias Adrian, Fabio Natalucci, and Thomas Piontek
November 15, 2018
A drilling crew member raises a pipe on an oil rig in Texas: Energy is among the industries in which leveraged lending is most prevalent, along with telecommunications, health care, and technology (photo: Nick Oxford/Reuters/Newscom)
We warned in the most recent Global Financial Stability Report that speculative excesses in some financial markets may be approaching a threatening level. […]
Managing Debt Vulnerabilities in Low-Income and Developing Countries
By Tao Zhang
March 22, 2018
Versions in Português (Portuguese)
Congested streets in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In a third of low-income countries, including Bangladesh, government deficits finance investment in much needed infrastructure (photo: Motoya Taguchi/Jiji Press/Newscom).
Government debt in some of the world’s poorest countries is rising to risky levels, a new IMF report shows. The report looks at economic developments and prospects among the world’s low-income countries, which account for a fifth of the world’s population but only four percent of global output. […]
The Lowdown on U.S. Core Inflation
By Yasser Abdih
There was a time when U.S. central bankers worried that inflation was too high, and they tried to bring it down. Now the opposite is true: the Federal Reserve is concerned that inflation has remained stubbornly low, and it’s trying to boost prices. The reason: persistently low inflation raises the risk that prices will actually start to decline, a dangerous condition known as deflation. That’s bad news because it makes people less willing to borrow and spend—anticipating lower prices, consumers will put off spending—and could also lead to a fall in wages. […]
Capital Controls: When Are Multilateral Considerations of the Essence?
Bridging the Gap: How Official Financing Can Ease the Pain of Adjustment
Practicing Safe Borrowing in Low-income Countries
Low-income countries face vast development needs. One of the biggest impediments to rapid growth is a massive “infrastructure deficit.”
In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, indicators of road and rail infrastructure are only about half those in developing countries as a whole—comparisons with advanced economies, of course, would look even bleaker. Insufficient power generation capacity and telecommunications networks are also a big constraint. It is clear that large-scale investment programs, sustained over many years, will be needed to close these gaps. Both private and public sectors will have a role to play.
The snag, of course, is that investment spending typically has to be financed by borrowing, and until quite recently, the ability of low-income country governments to take on more debt has been severely hampered by legacies from the past. Many had built up unsustainable debt as a result of bad borrowing and spending decisions, poor project implementation, weak revenue systems (governments could not collect the taxes needed to service the debts), and often bad luck (as their economies were hit by global shocks). In effect, these countries were caught in a debt trap.
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