In the wake of Dubai’s debt crisis, analysts
are trying to predict the next big blowup.

By GRAHAM BOWLEY and CATHERINE RAMPELL

GOVERNMENTS AND COMPANIES across the globe are straining under the weight of debts that, some fear, might never be fully paid back.

As Dubai, that one-time wonderland in the desert, struggles to pay its bills, a troubling question hangs over the financial world: Is this latest financial crisis an isolated event, or a harbinger of still more debt shocks?

For the moment, at least, global investors seem to be taking Dubai’s sinking fortunes in their stride.

But the travails of Dubai, a boomtown that with its palm-shaped islands and indoor ski slope became a potent symbol of hyperwealth, nonetheless have some economists wondering where other debt bombs might be lurking-and just how dangerous they might turn out to be.


MINH UONG/THE NEW YORK TIMES


Big banks that have only just begun to recover from the financial shocks of last year are now nervously eyeing their potential exposure to highly indebted corporations and governments.

From the Baltics to the Mediterranean, the bills for an unprecedented borrowing binge are starting to fall due. In Russia and the former Soviet bloc, where high oil prices helped feed rapid growth, a mountain of debt must be refinanced as short-term i.o.u.’s come due.

Even in rich nations like the United States and Japan, which are increasing government spending to shore up slack economies, mounting budget deficits are raising concern about governments’ ability to shoulder their debts, especially once interest rates start to rise again.

The numbers are startling. In Germany, long the bastion of fiscal rectitude in Europe, government debt is on the rise. There, the government debt outstanding is expected to increase to the equivalent of 77 percent of the nation’s economic output next year, up from 60 percent in 2002. In Britain, that figure is expected to more than double over the same period, to more than 80 percent.


Worldwide debt
swells for nations and
companies.


The burdens are even greater in Ireland and Latvia, where economic booms driven by easy credit and soaring property values have given way to precipitous busts. Public debt in Ireland is expected to soar to 83 percent of gross domestic product next year, from just 25 percent in 2007. Latvia is sinking into debt even faster. Its borrowings will reach the equivalent of nearly half the economy next year, up from 9 percent a mere two years ago.

Like Latvia, the Baltic states of Lithuania and Estonia remain exposed, as do Bulgaria and Hungary. All of these nations carry foreign debt that exceeds 100 percent of their G.D.P.’s, said Ivan Tchakarov, chief economist for Russia and the former Soviet states at Nomura bank. External debt is often held in a foreign currency, which means governments cannot use devaluation of their own currencies as a tool to reduce their debt when they run into trouble, according to Maurice Obstfeld, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Few analysts predict a major nation will default on its government debts in the immediate future. Indeed, many maintain that rich nations and the International Monetary Fund would intervene if a government needed a bailout. But there are no assurances that companies in these nations, which, like governments, gorged on debt in good times, will be rescued. Dubai’s refusal to guarantee the debts of its investment arm, Dubai World, may set a precedent for other indebted governments to abandon companies that investors had in the past assumed enjoyed full state backing.

“I see very good reasons to be worried that at some point in 2010 we are going to see more cases of ring-fencing because governments realize they can’t afford to guarantee the debts of these companies,” said Pierre Cailleteau, managing director of the global sovereign risk group and chief economist of Moody’s.

Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard economist , said: “I think right now every vulnerable country has one or two deeppocketed backers that pretty much rule out a sudden run.” But he said he expected a wave of defaults about two years from now .

In the crisis, some governments have taken on increasingly short-term debt.

“In another couple years as industrialized countries’ own debts - in places like Germany, Japan and the United States - get worse, they will become more reluctant to open up their wallets to spendthrift emerging markets, or at least countries they view that way,” Mr. Rogoff said.

Facing a need to roll over their maturing debts, emerging markets may have to borrow around $65 billion in 2010 alone, according to Gary N. Kleiman of Kleiman International, an independent analyst.

But while government debt may be a problem, corporate debt may set off a crisis that, in some ways, is already unfolding. Corporate borrowing surged over the last five years. According to Mr. Kleiman, $200 billion of corporate debt is coming due this year or next year. He estimates that companies in Russia and the United Arab Emirates account for about half of that borrowing.

“This is where the Achilles heel is,” he said. Companies in several countries face immediate tests.

Companies in China will have to borrow $8.8 billion in 2010; companies in Mexico $11 billion.

According to an analysis by JPMorgan Chase, Russian companies borrowed $220 billion from banks or by selling bonds from 2006 to 2008. That is the equivalent of 13 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product. In the Emirates, that figure was $135.6 billion, or 53 percent of G.D.P.; in Turkey, it was $72 billion, or 10 percent of G.D.P.; and in Kazakhstan, it was $44 billion, or 44 percent of G.D.P.

In the past, if companies could not meet those obligations, governments might have stepped in. But already some companies have defaulted on payments after assumed government guarantees failed to materialize.

THE NEW YORK TIMES