BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Highly indebted governments may be constrained both in their scope for engaging in traditional countercyclical stabilisation policies and in their role as lenders of last resort during an economic or financial crisis. Moreover, growth might be hampered by excessive debt levels.
Following the empirical findings of Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, who concentrated on the impacts of public debt on growth, recent BIS research also looked at corporate and household debt. The main finding is that there is a threshold of about 85% of GDP beyond which an additional 10 percentage points of debt reduces average per-capita growth by 13–14 basis points.