What will cause the next debt crisis?

FOR her CBC Massey Lectures in 2008, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood chose to talk about debt. The text, written in the first half of the year (and later published as Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth), described how she’d noticed a lot more ads on public transportation for debt relief services. “Why are there so many of these ads? Is it because there are unprecedented numbers of people in debt? Very possibly,” she said.

Today, more than 10 years after the global debt-driven financial crisis that Atwood intuited, angst remains. Central banks that bought bonds and kept interest rates low to spur economic recovery have fuelled record levels of corporate and government borrowing. While Atwood’s lectures considered debt from historical, theological, literary, and even ecological perspectives, we asked investors and analysts to consider a simpler question as this credit cycle ages: What could go wrong now?