The World Economy May Be Closer to a Breaking Point Than It Looks, Central Bankers Warn
The central bankers’ bank says AI exuberance, high debt, inflation risk and fragile bond markets are shrinking the world’s room to absorb the next crisis.
The Cost of Money — A Premium Intellectualist Series on Capital Markets
The global economy, by many surface measures, still looks surprisingly strong. Markets remain buoyant. Artificial intelligence has become the organizing story of a new investment cycle. Governments continue to borrow. Oil prices have retreated from their most alarming levels. Growth has not broken in the way many analysts once feared.
That is why the latest warning from the Bank for International Settlements matters. The BIS is not a political body, a campaign organization or a market commentator. It is the institution often called the central bankers’ bank, a forum for the officials responsible for money, inflation, banking stability and the financial plumbing that keeps the global economy functioning. When the BIS warns that policymakers may have less room to maneuver, it is not speaking in the language of alarmism. It is speaking in the language of people whose job is to prevent financial stress from becoming systemic.
The BIS is not predicting a collapse of the global economy. Its warning is more subtle, and in some ways more disturbing. The danger is not that one crisis is certain to arrive. It is that ordinary shocks may now become harder to absorb because the system built to absorb them has weakened.
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