domingo, 25 de enero de 2015

domingo, enero 25, 2015
Shadow banking now poses top risk to US stability, warns IMF

Non-financial lending has reached $15 trillion since the crisis and is outside the control of authorities warns the Fund's deputy chief

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in Davos

4:25PM GMT 21 Jan 2015

NYC Times Square
US shadow banking sector now exceeds that of China Photo: © Images & Stories / Alamy
 
 
The US shadow banking nexus is coming back to haunt like some hydra-headed beast and now poses the biggest potential threat to the American financial system, the International Monetary Fund has warned. 
 
Zhu Min, the IMF's deputy chief, said regulators have successfully cleaned up much of the global banking system since the Lehman crisis, but the excesses have moved off books and are once again growing to disturbing proportions.
 
"The key risk has shifted to shadow banking," he said, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
 
While the explosion of China's shadow banking is well-known, Zhu Min said there has been a surge of lending by asset management funds and others non-bank players to US companies. This is outside normal control and is hard to track.
 
"Non-financial corporations have raised $1.3 trillion (£860bn) through shadow banking in the US alone," he told the Telegraph.

The IMF estimates that contingent liabilities of these shadow forms of lending have reached $15 trillion in the US, using a "broad" measure of activities that captures new forms of risk. This is higher than in China. It is roughly 180pc of banking assets and is rising rapidly towards its pre-Lehman peak. It is particularly worrying since it was a "run" on the interlinked world of structured finance that caused the global crisis to metastasise in 2008.
 
Zhu Min said the oil price crash is "terrific news" for consumers but warned that its effects are double-edged and raise a whole new set of risks. It may set off a fiscal crisis in producer countries and a debt-repayment crunch for oil companies with $1 trillion of bonds. "There may be a spillover impact. It is a net positive but it should not be overestimated," he said.
 
The concerns were echoed by David Rubenstein, head of the Carlyle Group, who said the slide in oil prices to $50 a barrel is likely to set off a chain of defaults by Russian companies that owe $650bn of external debt.
 
"They can't service the debt. And who owns that debt? It is nearly all held by European banks.

They are going to be hurt, and I suspect that currency turbulence in Europe is going to hurt them too," he said.
 
Mr Rubenstein raised the disturbing possibility that the West is already at the end of the post-Lehman growth cycle, rather than at the start of a new expansion as most people assume.

"Typically we have had a recession about every 7 years, and we are now at the end of seven years. Something is going to happen in the US that we're not expecting," he said.

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