7/2/15: Euro Area's Debt Addiction

Europe's debt addiction in one chart: the following chart plots total domestic and cross-border credit to non-banks, at constant end-Q2 2014 exchange rates, in per cent of GDP:

Source: BIS: http://www.bis.org/statistics/gli/gli_feb15.pdf

In the above:

• The solid lines are actual outcomes, 
• The vertical lines indicate the 2007 beginning of the global financial crisis and the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. 
• Figures include government. 
• The dashed lines reflect long term trend, calculated as for the countercyclical capital buffer in Basel III using a one-sided HP-filter.

Two obvious conclusions emerge from the above:

1. Since the start of the Global Financial Crisis, debt addiction expanded both in the US and the Euro area, with US addiction rising faster than the Euro area's.
2. The gap between Euro area and US dependency on debt at the end of 2014 stood at a similar level as at the start of the Global Financial Crisis and above the pre-crisis level. That is despite the fact that in the US, most recent manifestation of the debt addiction has been associated with much higher economic growth and jobs recovery than in Europe.