In finance, things that grow very fast have an irksome tendency to blow up. American subprime mortgages prior to 2008, southern European sovereign debt in the run-up to 2010 and Japanese banks in the 1980s are but recent examples. So it is worrying that bank lending in emerging markets has ballooned in recent years, from about 77% of gdp in 2007 to 128% at the beginning of this year, according to JPMorgan Chase, a rich-world bank (see chart). That 51-percentage-point jump dwarfs the mere 20-point rise in credit in the rich world in 2002-07.
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