As the US Federal Reserve raises interest rates, debate rages over whether this tightening cycle will trigger a recession or not. History suggests an interesting answer: since the second world war, Fed tightening has led to a range of outcomes for the economy, from hard to softish landings, but has always led to financial crises somewhere — including every major global crisis in recent decades.
With the rapid spread of bank and mortgage lending, the first signs of crisis often materialise in rising corporate and household debt, concentrated in real estate. Today, however, these signs are at worrying levels in only a few nations, led by Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
But that doesn’t offer much comfort. The constant flow of easy money out of central banks has fed serial crises for decades. Regulators typically try to address the sources of the last crisis, only to divert credit to new targets. After the global crisis in 2008, authorities cracked down on the main sources of that meltdown — big banks and mortgage lending — which pushed the flow of easy money into less heavily regulated sectors, particularly corporate lending by “shadow banks.”
