How bad are currency mismatches these days?

The words of Gillian Tett are worth a ponder:

…corporate leverage in regions such as Asia is considerably higher today, relative to gross domestic product, than it was before the 1998 Asian financial crisis, as Frank Neumann of HSBC notes. What is even more alarming is that these numbers might understate the risk since many emerging market companies have been using offshore vehicles to raise funds — and those flows are not well tracked.

The BIS reckons that about half of the debt securities sold between 2009 and 2013 by emerging market entities, along with a large chunk of loans, were channelled via offshore entities, not onshore parent companies. These offshore entities typically swap this money from dollars into domestic currency and repatriate it to the head office.

Brazilian, Russian and Chinese firms, for example, are thought to have created some $35bn of these internal intra-company flows in the first quarter of 2013 alone. But these flows are often recorded in the data as a “foreign direct investment flow”, not debt. The risk, then, is that companies are exposed to currency mismatches that will only become clear at a later date.

The full FT article is here.  Here is a related article, focusing on Claudio Borio.  Here are Borio and Hyum Shin from the BIS.

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