Over the same period, the stock of household, corporate and government debt outstanding rose by $ trillion, more than three times as much. But it is possible that the global imbalances may have played into the credit boom through another route. Bernanke’s “savings glut” hypothesis was advanced primarily as an explanation for the decline in long-term real interest rates seen during this decade; see Fig. 8. And that low level of real returns on government bonds may in turn have encouraged financial institutions to shift into other, riskier, assets that offered a higher return, such as the burgeoning class of asset-backed securities – what came to be known as the “search for yield”. There is not a lot of research yet that sheds light one way or the other on the role of the global imbalances in the credit/asset-price boom. There is quite a strong correlation across countries between house price inflation and current account deficits (Fig. 9), but this says nothing about causality, which plausibly could also run from house prices, via demand, to the current account. In fact, Granger-causality tests point to bi-directional causality, running from both current accounts to house prices and vice versa 5 .
We will have many opportunities during the course of this work to discuss with the Committee on Finance how we can develop and improve our analyses. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3