, Columnist
It’s the $65 Trillion in Debt You Can’t Find That’ll Get You
Accounting conventions have hidden immense amounts of foreign-exchange liabilities. We might not know where they are until the next crisis.
Where are the US dollars?
Photographer: Lam Yik/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Sixty-five trillion dollars is a not big number: It’s a huge, barely comprehensible number. It’s more than 2 1/2 times the size of the entire US Treasury market, the world’s biggest. It’s 14% of the value of all financial assets globally, according to a tally from the Bank for International Settlements.
It’s also the value of hidden dollar debt unrecorded on the balance sheets of non-US banks and shadow banks as of June this year, also according to the BIS, the central bankers’ central bank. It has been growing rapidly, having nearly doubled since 2008.