BIS VETERAN SAYS GLOBAL CREDIT EXCESS WORSE THAN PRE-LEHMAN

BIS veteran says global credit excess worse than pre-Lehman

Extreme forms of credit excess across the world have reached or surpassed levels seen shortly before the Lehman crisis five years ago, the Bank for International Settlements has warned.

An employee of Christie's auction house manoeuvres a Lehman Brothers corporate logo, which is estimated to sell for 1500 GBP and is featured in the sale of art owned by the collapsed investment bank Lehman BrotherS

Global credit excess has reached or surpassed levels seen shortly before the Lehman crisis, says BIS

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

2:24PM BST 15 Sep 2 013

The Swiss-based `bank of central banks’ said a hunt for yield was luring investors en masse into high-risk instruments, “a phenomenon reminiscent of exuberance prior to the global financial crisis”.

This is happening just as the US Federal Reserve prepares to wind down stimulus and starts to drain dollar liquidity from global markets, an inflexion point that is fraught with danger and could go badly wrong.

“This looks like to me like 2007 all over again, but even worse,” said William White, the BIS’s former chief economist, famous for flagging the wild behaviour in the debt markets before the global storm hit in 2008.

“All the previous imbalances are still there. Total public and private debt levels are 30pc higher as a share of GDP in the advanced economies than they were then, and we have added a whole new problem with bubbles in emerging markets that are ending in a boom-bust cycle,” said Mr White, now chairman of the OECD’s Economic Development and Review Committee.

The BIS said in its quarterly review that the issuance of subordinated debt -- which leaves lenders exposed to bigger losses if things go wrong -- has jumped more than threefold over the last year to $52bn in Europe, and jumped tenfold to $22bn in the US.