Are we facing another subprime crisis?

Fears are growing that leveraged loans – a high-risk section of the corporate debt market – could cause a subprime mortgage-style meltdown. Marina Gerner reports.

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Toys R Us collapsed under the weight of its debts
(Image credit: Credit: Stacy Walsh Rosenstock / Alamy Stock Photo)

Fears are growing that leveraged loans a high-risk section of the corporate debt market, worth more than $1.2trn could cause a "subprime mortgage-style meltdown", say Anna Isaac and Tom Rees in The Daily Telegraph. This time, the borrowers are not US homeowners taking out mortgages, but "US companies with weaker credit ratings", notesJim Puzzanghera in the Los Angeles Times.

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Marina Gerner is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has written for the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, The Guardian and Standpoint magazine in the UK; the New York Observer in the US; and die Bild and Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany.

Marina is also an adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business at their London campus, and has a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Her first book, The Vagina Business, deals with the potential of “femtech” to transform women’s lives, and will be published by Icon Books in September 2024.

Marina is trilingual and lives in London.