Showing posts with label debt crises. Show all posts
Showing posts with label debt crises. Show all posts

Thursday, September 28, 2017

28/7/17: Climbing the Deficit Mountains: Advanced Economies in the Age of Austerity


Just a stat: between 2001-2006 period, cumulative Government deficits across the Advanced Economies rose by SUD 5.135 trillion. Over the subsequent 6 years period (2007-2012) the same deficits clocked up USD 14.299 trillion and over the period 2013-2018 (using IMF forecasts for 2017 and 2018), the cumulated deficits will add up to USD 8.197 trillion. On an average annual basis, deficits across the Advanced Economies run at an annual rate of USD0.86 trillion over 2001-2006, USD 2.375 trillion over 2007-2012 and USD 1.385 trillion over 2013-2017 (excluding forecast year of 2018).

As a percentage of GDP, 2001-2006 saw Government deficits for the Advanced economies averaging 2.68% of GDP annually in pre-crisis era, rising to 5.42% of GDP in peak crisis years of 2007-2012, and running at 2.98% of GDP in 2013-2017 period. Looking at the post-crisis period, return to pre-crisis levels of Government spending would require

In simple terms, there is a mountain of deficits out there that has been sustained by cheap - Central Banks’ subsidised - funding, the cost of which is starting to go North. The cost of debt financing is a material risk consideration.



Wednesday, July 26, 2017

26/7/17: Credit booms, busts and the real costs of debt bubbles


A new BIS Working Paper (No 645) titled “Accounting for debt service: the painful legacy of credit booms” by Mathias Drehmann, Mikael Juselius and Anton Korinek (June 2017 http://www.bis.org/publ/work645.pdf) provides a very detailed analysis of the impact of new borrowing by households on future debt service costs and, via the latter, on the economy at large, including the probability of future debt crises.

According to the top level findings: “When taking on new debt, borrowers increase their spending power in the present but commit to a pre-specified future path of debt service, consisting of interest payments and amortizations. In the presence of long-term debt, keeping track of debt service explains why credit-related expansions are systematically followed by downturns several years later.” In other words, quite naturally, taking on debt today triggers repayments that peak with some time in the future. The growth, peaking and subsequent decline in debt service costs (repayments) triggers a real economic response (reducing future savings, consumption, investment, etc). In other words, with a lag of a few years, current debt take up leads to real economic consequences.

The authors proceed to describe the “lead-lag relationship between new borrowing and debt service” to establish “empirically that it provides a systematic transmission channel whereby credit expansions lead to future output losses and higher probability of financial crisis.”

How bad are the real effects of debt?

From theoretical point of view, “when new borrowing is auto-correlated [or put simply, when today’s new debt uptake is correlated positively with future debt levels] and debt is long term - features that are present in the real world - we demonstrate two systematic lead-lag relationships”:


  • “debt service peaks at a well-specified interval after the peak in new borrowing. The lag increases both in the maturity of debt and the degree of auto-correlation of new borrowing. The reason is that debt service is a function of the stock of debt outstanding, which continues to grow even after the peak in new borrowing.” It is worth noting a well-known fact that in some forms of debt, minimum required repayment levels of debt servicing (contractual provisions in, say, credit cards debt) is associated with automatically increasing debt levels into the future.

  • “net cash flows from lenders to borrowers reach their maximum before the peak in new borrowing and turn negative before the end of the credit boom, since the positive cash flow from new borrowing is increasingly offset by the negative cash flows from rising debt service.”


Using a panel of 17 countries from 1980 to 2015, the paper “empirically confirm the dynamic patterns identified in the accounting framework… We show that new borrowing is strongly auto-correlated over an interval of six years. It is also positively correlated with future debt service over the following ten years. In the data, peaks in debt service occur on average four years after peaks in new borrowing.” In other words, credit booms have negative legacy some 16 years past the peak of new debt uptake, so if we go back to the origins of the Global Financial Crisis, European household debts new uptake peaked at around 2008, while for the U.S. that marker was around 2007. The credit bust, therefore, should run sometime into 2022-2023. In Japan’s case, peak household new debt uptake was back in around 1988-1989, with adverse effects of that credit boom now into their 27 years duration.


When it comes to assessing the implications of credit booms for the real economy, the authors establish three key findings:

1) “…new household borrowing has a clear positive impact, and its counterpart, debt service, a significantly negative impact on output growth, both
of which last for several years. Together with the lead-lag relationship between new borrowing and debt service this implies that credit booms have a significantly positive output effect in the short run, which reverses and turns into a significantly negative output effect in the medium run, at a horizon of five to seven years.”

2) “…we demonstrate that most of the negative medium-run output effects of new borrowing in the data are driven by predictable future debt service effects.” The authors note that these results are in line with well-established literature on negative impact of credit / debt overhangs, including “the negative medium-run effect of new borrowing on growth is documented e.g. by Mian and Sufi (2014), Mian et al. (2013, 2017) and Lombardi et al. (2016). Claessens et al. (2012), Jorda et al. (2013), and Krishnamurthy and Muir (2016) document a link between credit booms and deeper recessions.” In other words, contrary to popular view that ‘debt doesn’t matter’, debt does matter and has severe and long term costs.


3) “…we also show that debt service is the main channel through which new borrowing affects the probability of financial crises. Consistent with a recent literature that has documented that debt growth is an early warning indicator for financial crises, we find that new borrowing increases the likelihood of financial crises in the medium run. Debt service, on the other hand, negatively affects the likelihood of crises in the short turn.”


In fact, increases in probability of the future crisis are “nearly fully” accounted for by “the negative effects of the future debt service generated by an increase in new borrowing”.

The findings are “robust to the inclusion of range of control variables as well as changes in sample and specification. Our baseline regressions control for interest rates and wealth effects. The results do not change when we control for additional macro factors, including credit spreads, productivity, net worth, lending standards, banking sector provisions and GDP forecasts, nor when we consider sub-samples of the data, e.g. a sample leaving out the Great Recession, or allow for time fixed effects. And despite at most 35 years of data, the relationships even hold at the country level.”

So we can cut the usual arguments that “this time” or “in this place” things will be different. Credit booms are costly, painful and long term.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

9/3/2014: Financial Repression, Debt Crises & Debt Restructuring: R&R Strike Again


According to Reinhart and Rogoff recent (December 2013) paper "Financial and Sovereign Debt Crises: Some Lessons Learned and Those Forgotten" (by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, IMF Working Paper WP/13/266, December 2013 http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2013/wp13266.pdf) many economies in the advanced world will require defaults, as well as drastic measures of Financial Repression, including savings taxes and higher inflation as debt levels reach a 200-year high.

You can read the entire paper, so I am just going to summarise some core points, albeit at length.


R&R open up with a statement that is more of a warning against our complacency than a claim of our arrogance: "Even after one of the most severe crises on record (in its fifth year as of 2012) in the advanced world, the received wisdom in policy circles clings to the notion that advanced, wealthy economies are completely different animals from their emerging market counterparts. Until 2007–08, the presumption was that they were not nearly as vulnerable to financial crises. When events disabused the world of that notion, the idea still persisted that if a financial crisis does occur, advanced countries are much better at managing the aftermath..."

This worldview is also not holding, according to R&R: "Even as the recovery consistently proved to be far weaker than most forecasters were expecting, policymakers continued to underestimate the depth and duration of the downturn."

The focal point of this delusional thinking is Europe, "…where the financial crisis transformed into sovereign debt crises in several countries, the current phase of the denial cycle is marked by an official policy approach predicated on the assumption that normal growth can be restored through a mix of austerity, forbearance, and growth."

The point is that European (and other advanced economies' policymakers are deceiving the public (and themselves), believing that they "…do not need to apply the standard toolkit used by emerging markets, including debt restructurings, higher inflation, capital controls, and significant financial repression. Advanced countries do not resort to such gimmicks, policymakers say. To do so would be to give up hard-earned credibility, thereby destabilizing expectations and throwing the economy into a vicious circle."

Note: per R&R "“Financial repression” includes directed lending to government by captive domestic audiences (such as pension funds), explicit or implicit caps on interest rates, regulation of cross-border capital movements, and generally a tighter connection between government and banks. It often masks a subtle type of debt restructuring."

The warning that stems from the above is that "It is certainly true that policymakers need to manage public expectations. However, by consistently choosing instruments and calibrating responses based on overly optimistic medium-term scenarios, they risk ultimately losing credibility and destabilizing expectations rather than the reverse."

It is worth noting as a separate point in addition to the above issues that:

  1. Financial repression in its traditional means (forcing public debt into investment portfolio of captive funds, such as pension funds, reducing real returns on savings, tax on savings, bail-ins of private investors etc) in the case of the advanced economies are running against demographic changes, such as ageing of these societies. Just as the economies reliance on savings and pensions rises, financial repression is cutting into the economies savings and pensions.
  2. Higher inflation is associated with higher interest rates in the longer term, which can have a devastating impact on debt-burdened households. Hence, deleveraging of the sovereigns cuts against the objective of deleveraging the real economy (households and companies). This is most pronounced in the case of countries like Ireland.
  3. Strong point from R&R on austerity. In many cases, advanced economies debate about austerity is 0:1 - either 'do austerity' or 'do expansionary fiscal policy'. This is superficial. Per R&R: "Although austerity in varying degrees is necessary, in many cases it is not sufficient to cope with the sheer magnitude of public and private debt overhangs."


So the key lessons from the past are as follows.

Lesson 1: "On prevention versus crisis management. We have done better at the latter than the former. It is doubtful that this will change as memories of the crisis fade and financial market participants and their regulators become complacent."

Figure 1. Varieties of Crises: World Aggregate, 1900–2010
A composite index of banking, currency, sovereign default, and inflation crises (BCDI), and stock market crashes (BCDI+stock) (weighted by their share of world income)


Lesson 2: "On diagnosing and understanding the scope and depth of the risks and magnitudes of the debt. What is public and what is private? Domestic and external debt are not created equal. And debt is usually MUCH bigger than what meets the eye."

R&R are not shying away from the bold statements (in my view - completely warranted): "The magnitude of the overall debt problem facing advanced economies today is difficult to overstate. The mix of an aging society, an expanding social welfare state, and stagnant population growth would be difficult in the best of circumstances. This burden has been significantly compounded by huge increases in government debt in the wake of the crisis, illustrated in Figure 2. …As the figure illustrates, the emerging markets actually deleveraged in the decade before the financial crisis, whereas advanced economies hit a peak not seen since the end of World War II. In fact, going back to 1800, the current level of central government debt in advanced economies is approaching a two-century high-water mark."

Figure 2. Gross Central Government Debt as a Percentage of GDP: Advanced and Emerging Market Economies, 1900–2011 (unweighted average)

Things are even worse when it comes to external debt, as Figure 3 illustrates.

Figure 3. Gross Total (Public plus Private) External Debt as a Percentage of GDP: 22 advanced and 25 Emerging Market Economies, 1970–2011

Note the 'exponential' trend on the chart above since the 1990s...

This is non-trivial (as per Figure 2 conclusions). "The distinction between external debt and domestic debt can be quite important. Domestic debt issued in domestic currency typically offers a far wider range of partial default options than does foreign currency–denominated external debt. Financial repression has already been mentioned; governments can stuff debt into local pension funds and insurance companies, forcing them through regulation to accept far lower rates of return than they might otherwise demand. But domestic debt can also be reduced through inflation."

And, as Figure 4 illustrates, public and external debts overhang are just the beginning of the troubles: "the explosion of private sector debt before the financial crisis. Unlike central government debt, for which the series are remarkably stationary over a two-century period, private sector debt shows a marked upward trend due to financial innovation and globalization, punctuated by volatility caused by periods of financial repression and financial liberalization."

Figure 4. Private Domestic Credit as a Percentage of GDP, 1950–2011 (22 Advanced and 28 Emerging Market Economies)


Lesson 3: "Crisis resolution. How different are advanced economies and emerging markets? Not as different as is widely believed."

R&R (2013) show "five ways to reduce large debt-to-GDP ratios (Box1). Most historical episodes have involved some combination of these."



As R&R note, "the first on the list is relatively rare and the rest are difficult and unpopular." But more ominously, "recent policy discussion has tended to forget options (3) and (5), arguing that advanced countries do not behave that way. In fact, option (5) was used extensively by advanced countries to deal with post–World War II debt (Reinhart and Sbrancia, 2011) and option (3) was common enough before World War II."

Beyond the fact that the two measures have precedent in modern history of the advanced economies, there is also the issue of the current crisis being of greater magnitude than previous ones.

"Given the magnitude of today’s debt and the likelihood of a sustained period of sub-par average growth, it is doubtful that fiscal austerity will be sufficient, even combined with financial repression. Rather, the size of the problem suggests that restructurings will be needed, particularly, for example, in the periphery of Europe, far beyond anything discussed in public to this point. Of course, mutualization of euro country debt effectively uses northern country taxpayer resources to bail out the periphery and reduces the need for restructuring. But the size of the overall problem is such that mutualization could potentially result in continuing slow growth or even recession in the core countries, magnifying their own already challenging sustainability problems for debt and old age benefit programs."


The authors conclude that "…if policymakers are fortunate, economic growth will provide a soft exit, reducing or eliminating the need for painful restructuring, repression, or inflation. But the evidence on debt overhangs is not heartening. Looking just at the public debt overhang, and not
taking into account old-age support programs, the picture is not encouraging. Reinhart, Reinhart, and Rogoff (2012) consider 26 episodes in which advanced country debt exceeded 90 percent of GDP, encompassing most or all of the episodes since World War II. (They tabulate the small number of cases in which the debt overhang lasted less than five years, but do not include these in their overhang calculations.) They find that debt overhang episodes averaged 1.2 percent lower growth than individual country averages for non-overhang periods. Moreover, the average duration of the overhang episodes is 23 years. Of course, there are many other factors that determine longer-term GDP growth, including especially the rate of productivity growth. But given that official public debt is only one piece of the larger debt overhang issue, it is clear that governments should be careful in their assumption that growth alone will be able to end the crisis. Instead, today’s advanced country governments may have to look increasingly to the approaches that have long been associated with emerging markets, and that advanced countries themselves once practiced not so long ago."


What R&R are showing in their paper is that Financial Repression already underway is hardly inconsistent with the potential for further restructuring and repression. They also show that the current crisis is still unresolved and ongoing and that the current de-acceleration in crisis dynamics is not necessarily a sign of sustained recovery: things are much longer term than 1-2 years of growth can correct for. In the mean time, as we know, the EU continues on the path of shifting more and more future crisis liabilities onto the shoulders of savers and investors, while offloading more and more public debt overhang costs onto the shoulders of taxpayers. All along, the media and our politicians keep talking down the risks of future bailouts, bail-ins and structural pain (lower growth rates, higher interest rates, higher rates of private insolvencies).


Note: You can read more on the rather lively debate about the effects of debt on growth by searching this blog for "Reinhart & Rogoff" Some of the links are here:


Monday, October 21, 2013

21/10/2013: Household Debt Crisis: Social Drivers


Recent CEPR Discussion Paper No. 9238 (December 2012) titled "Household Debt and Social Interactions" by Dimitris Georgarakos, Michael Haliassos and Giacomo Pasini looked at social determinants and drivers for debt accumulation amongst households.


According to the authors, "Debt-induced crises, including the subprime crisis, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey, representative of the Dutch population, that circumvents the issue of defining the social circle, we consider collateralized, consumer, and informal loans. We find robust social effects on borrowing - especially among those who consider themselves poorer than their peers - and on indebtedness, suggesting a link to financial distress. We employ a number of approaches to rule out spurious associations and to handle correlated effects."

More specifically, the authors find that "the higher the perceived income of the social circle is, the greater is the tendency of respondents to take up loans and borrow sizeable amounts. This is true both for uncollateralized (consumer) loans and for collateralized loans…"

The above effect is "stronger for those who perceive themselves as having lower income than their social circle." In effect, this is keeping up with the Joneses effect, magnified by within-reference group peer effects.

"The tendency of households to take up uncollateralized and collateralized loans, controlling for the perceived average income of the social circle, is partly related to perceived spending ability or (computed) housing assets of members of the social circle."

"Moreover, we find that expectations about (the minimum) next period’s income are statistically significant for collateralized loans, pointing to a ‘Tunnel Effect’, but do not render perceived income of the peers insignificant. This is consistent with the idea that borrowing behavior is influenced by peer income not only because it conveys some information regarding the respondent’s own future, but also because of some comparison or envy effect." Notice - this is about basic human psychology, as co-determined by external (not internal or own-control) factors. In other words, any corrective policy will have to address the issue of peer effects, not only 'own effects'.

"Finally, the role of such comparisons is not confined to the tendency to borrow and to the level of borrowing conditional on participation, but it seems to extend also to financial distress."

To reinforce the argument above that the drivers of borrowing crises are social, not just individual (and hence any responsibility, liability and policy actions on this front have to be co-shared): "Our study has uncovered a potential for social influences on borrowing. By observing that others have higher average incomes, the household not only tries to emulate their
spending, as earlier studies have found, but also decides to borrow more, only partly because of expectations of higher future own income. Such decisions may be encouraged by a massive and unprecedented housing boom associated with high collateral values and expectations of continuing house price trends. The policy implication of our finding that social comparisons matter for debt behavior, after controlling for fundamental characteristics
of the household and region-time trends, is not to interfere with the process of forming social circles or perceptions regarding them, but rather to decouple perceptions of income or spending differences with peers from any decisions to borrow without proper account of the associated risks."

My view: let's cut puritanism bull**&t and recognise that debt crises are not solely driven/caused by the reckless behaviour of individuals taken in an isolated setting, but are social / societal phenomena. This realisation should lead us to a recognition that dealing with prevention of future crises and with the fallouts from the current ones requires co-shared responsibility and liability.


Source: for earlier version (free to download) http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=127996

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

9/10/2013: Returning to Reinhart & Rogoff Debate

Remember the debate about Reinhart & Rogoff paper and the excel errors? Here's a superb response to the idiotic (that's right - absolutely idiotic) level of debate on the topic in the media from Angus Deaton: http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2013/10/on_weights_and.html

To remind you, my own view was expressed here:




Saturday, March 23, 2013

23/3/2013: And the Strong Are Yet to Become Strong: German Debt Sustainability


A very interesting paper by Burret, Heiko T, Feld, Lars P. and Koehler, Ekkehard A., titled "Sustainability of German Fiscal Policy and Public Debt: Historical and Time Series Evidence for the Period 1850-2010" (February 28, 2013). CESifo Working Paper Series No. 4135. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2228623

Here's from the abstract:

"In the last decades, the majority of OECD countries has experienced a continuous increase in public debt. The European debt crisis has prompted a fundamental re‐evaluation of public debt sustainability and the looming threat of sovereign debt default. Due to a multitude of large scale events in its past, Germany is far from being an exception: In fact, Germany’s peacetime debt‐to‐GDP (Gross Domestic Product) ratio has never been higher."

And a chart:
[Click on the chart to enlarge]

On methodology: "In this paper, we analyse the sustainability of Germany’s public finances against the standard theoretical back‐ground using a unique database, retrieved from multiple sources covering the period from 1850 to 2010. Multiple currency crises and external events offer anecdotal evidence, contradicting the historical perception of Germany as the poster child of European public finance. Given these corresponding breaks in time series, the empirical analysis is conducted for the sub‐periods 1872‐1913 and 1950‐2010. In addition to an anecdotal historical analysis, we conduct formal tests on fiscal sustainability, including tests on stationarity and cointegration and the estimation of Vector Autoregression (VAR) and Vector Error Correction Models (VECM)."

And the punchline: "While we cannot reject the hypothesis that fiscal policy was sustainable in the period before the First World War, the tests allow for a rejection of the hypothesis of fiscal sustainability for the period from 1950 to 2010. This evidence leads to the conclusion that Germany’s public debt is in dire need of consolidation. Albeit a much needed reform, the incompleteness of the German debt brake will have to be addressed in the coming years, in order to ensure that fiscal consolidation actually takes place"

[Skip below to see the more extensive summary of conclusions]

And the recent experience? Here are the economic fundamentals pertaining to the cost of capital and growth:





A descriptive table of stats summarising the overall performance:


And public expenditure levels (alongside revenue and balances)


So the results after skipping through loads of rigorous tests are:

"After the experience of the two World Wars, the German population is quickly alarmed when debt levels appear to be rising to unsustainable levels. This holds particularly for recent years, as Germany’s debt‐to‐GDP ratio has never been higher in peacetime than today...

In this paper, we analyse sustainability of German public finances from 1872 to 2010. Given the breaks in the data series, in particular those induced by the two World Wars, the main analysis is conducted for the sub‐periods 1872‐1913 and 1950‐2010. …While we cannot reject the hypothesis that fiscal policy was sustainable in the period before the First World War, this only holds if we do not allow for trends in the cointegration relation. The hypothesis of fiscal sustainability for the years 1950 to 2010, on the other hand, must be rejected. After the Second World War, German public finances have become unsustainable.

This evidence leads to the conclusion that public finances in Germany are in dire need of consolidation. In fact, the introduction of the debt brake in the year 2009 is a much needed reaction to this development. Although such fiscal rules always have their loopholes and are necessarily incomplete, they usually have some success in restricting public deficits and debt (Feld and Kirchgässner 2008, Feld and Baskaran 2010). The incompleteness of the German debt brake will have to be addressed in the coming years in order to ensure that fiscal consolidation actually takes place. One shortcoming of the new debt rule requires wider ranging reform, however: The Länder (including their local jurisdic‐tions) not only have huge consolidation requirements, they also do not have the tax autonomy to balance the spending demands on their budgets. The next major reform of the German fiscal constitution should thus allow for more tax autonomy at the sub‐federal level."

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

28/8/2012: Debt- v Equity-led Funding and Systemic Crises


Apparently, there's been some serious movements in today's banks CDS, signaling some pressure building up in the system and potentially a disconnect between equity markets and bond markets. This wouldn't be the first time the two are mis-firing in an almost random fashion. In the longer-term, however, such episodes are very troubling for a good reason - long term imbalances build up in the two sources of capital funding is hard to unwind. It turns out, however, the difficulty of unwinding these is non-symmetric.

Last week's NBER Working Paper number 18329 (link here), titled "Debt- and Equity-led Capital Flow Episodes" by Kristin J. Forbes and Francis E. Warnock looked at "the episodes of extreme capital flow movements—surges, stops, flight, and retrenchment... [leading to] the question of":

  • Which types of capital flows are driving the episodes and 
  • If debt- ( bonds and banking flows) and equity-led (portfolio equity and FDI) episodes differ in material ways. 
"After identifying debt- and equity-led episodes, we find that most episodes of extreme capital flow movements around the world are debt-led and the factors associated with debt-led episodes are similar to the factors behind episodes identified with aggregate capital flow data. In contrast, equity-led episodes are less frequent, more idiosyncratic, and differ in nature from other episodes."

The study uses data on 50 emerging and developed countries starting with 1980 (at the earliest) and running through 2009.

The study found that "the vast majority of extreme capital flow episodes across our sample—80% 

of inflow episodes (surges and stops) and 70% of outflow episodes (flight and retrenchments)—are 
fueled by debt, not equity, flows."

After that, the paper develops analysis of "the factors that are associated with debt- and equity-led episodes of extreme capital flows. We follow the Forbes and Warnock (2012) analysis here by describing capital flow episodes as being driven by specific global factors, contagion, 

and/or domestic factors." 

The study found that: "to a first approximation equity-led episodes appear to be idiosyncratic, bearing 
little systematic relation to our explanatory variables. Notably, even the risk measures that were 
highlighted in Forbes and Warnock (2012) as being significantly related to extreme movements in 
aggregate capital flows have little or no significant relationship with equity-led episodes. In contrast, 
risk measures are important in explaining debt-led episodes; when risk aversion is high, debt-led surges 
are less likely and debt-led stops are more likely. Contagion, especially regional, is also important for 
debt-led episodes. Country-level variables are largely insignificant, except for domestic growth shocks; 
debt-led stops are more likely in countries experiencing a negative growth shock and debt-led surges are more likely in countries with a positive growth shock."

Perhaps in a warning to the policymakers currently embarking on financial repression path for dealing with the ongoing crises, "capital controls have little or no significance in  both equity-led and debt-led episodes, as also found in Forbes and Warnock (2012)."

Of course, we have to keep in mind that the current crisis is really a debt-led capital markets crisis, both at the corporate and sovereigns levels. And it is symmetric both for the US and Europe, where the main difference is not as much in equity vs debt financing, but in intermediated vs direct debt issuance.