U.S. and U.K. Exposure to Developing Countries

February 18, 2009 Kathy Lien

A time bomb is waiting to explode in the Eurozone with Western European banks at risk of defaults on Eastern European loans. This leads me to wonder, how much is the US and the UK exposed to developing countries. So I compiled the following charts from the latest Bank of International Settlements data (as of September 2008).

Euro area loans to developing nations are heavily skewed towards Eastern Europe while UK lends predominately to Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The US on the other hand lends primarily to Asia and Latin America.

Default risk in Asian nations are lower than Eastern European nations, which makes the UK and US less vulnerable if a time bomb explodes in Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile USD/JPY hit a 6 week high this morning after President Obama announced a foreclosure program.

Bank Lending

U.S. Loans

U.K. Loans

Follow the jump for Eurozone and Switzerland charts:

Europe Loans

Swiss Loans

About Kathy Lien 235 Articles

Kathy Lien is an Internationally Published Author and Chief Strategist of DailyFX.com, one of the world’s most popular online websites for currency research. Her trading books include the highly acclaimed, Day Trading the Currency Market: Technical and Fundamental Strategies to Profit form Market Swings (2005, Wiley); High Probability Trading Setups for the Currency Market E-Book (2006, Investopedia); and Millionaire Traders: How Everyday People Are Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game (2007, Wiley). As Chief Currency Strategist at FXCM, Kathy is responsible for providing research and analysis for DailyFX, the research arm of FXCM. She also co-edits the BK Forex Advisor, an Investopedia.com Premium Service with Boris Schlossberg – one of the few investment advisory letters focusing strictly on the 2 Trillion/day FX market.

Kathy is also one of the authors of Investopedia’s Forex Education section and has written for Tradingmarkets.com, the Asia Times Online, Stocks & Commodities Magazine, MarketWatch, ActiveTrader Magazine, Currency Trader, Futures Magazine and SFO. She is frequently quoted by Bloomberg, Reuters, the Wall street Journal, and the International Herald Tribune and has appeared on CNN, CNBC, CBS and Bloomberg Radio. She has also hosted trader chats on EliteTrader, eSignal and FXStreet, sharing her expertise in both technical and fundamental analysis.

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U.S. and U.K. Exposure to Developing Countries

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