$50 TRILLION IN DEBT: This is what the 'third wave' of the 2008 financial crisis looks like
It became a bit of a symbol of the economic and financial turmoil in China and much of the rest of the developing world: Growth has slowed, but debt is sloshing around like never before.
Goldman Sachs recently published a piece of research that boldly named what's happening in the world's emerging markets (EM) right now as the "third wave" of the financial crisis that began in 2008.
The first wave was the US sub-prime housing crisis, and the second wave was the eurozone sovereign debt crisis.
Emerging markets are now undergoing what's euphemistically referred to as "rebalancing." China is the biggest part of this move, as its economy shifts away from government-driven investment towards consumption.
The last several years of monetary policy easing in the advanced economies led to enormous capital flows into emerging markets, as cheap money was borrowed to invest in countries where growth was faster than the sluggish pace of the West. Those days are coming to an end. And that puts the developing world in a bind.
Commodity prices - the backbone of EM economies -surged during the 2000s. Even after the financial crisis, commodities rallied from early 2009 into the middle of 2011. Since then, prices have slumped by nearly 50%.
Goldman suggests that the "high levels of debt risk" could push countries into "a tailspin that threatens global growth." That's not their expectation, but it's the concern.
Even since the financial crisis, the world has racked up another $50 trillion in non-finance sector debt, much of which is owed by corporations in the developing world. We'll only find out how those newly leveraged businesses cope with their growth slowdown as it happens over the coming years.
Here we show what's happened to emerging markets, and why people are starting to worry about it.