BIS global liquidity indicators at end-December 2025

Key takeaways

  • The BIS global liquidity indicators show that foreign currency credit in US dollars and euros continued to grow robustly, both globally and in EMDEs.

Global liquidity indicators at end-December 2025

The BIS global liquidity indicators (GLIs) track total credit to non-bank borrowers, covering both loans extended by banks and funding from international bond markets.9 The latter is captured through the net issuance (gross issuance less redemptions) of international debt securities (IDS). The focus is on foreign currency credit denominated in the three major reserve currencies (US dollar, euro and Japanese yen) to non-residents, ie borrowers outside the respective currency areas.

Foreign currency credit denominated in US dollars and euros continued to grow robustly in 2025. Dollar credit expanded by 8.5% yoy, the fastest annual growth since Q3 2014 (Graph 5.A, solid red line). This brought its outstanding stock to $14.3 trillion (Graph 5.B, red line). Euro credit grew at an even higher annual rate of 11% (Graph 5.A, solid blue line), which took its outstanding stock to €4.9 trillion by the end of the year (Graph 5.B, blue line). In contrast, foreign currency credit denominated in Japanese yen contracted by 4.9% during 2025.

In line with global trends, dollar and euro credit to EMDEs expanded significantly over the past decade (Graph 5.C). Dollar credit grew by 35%, rising from $3.2 trillion at end-2015 to $4.3 trillion at end-2025. Over the same period, euro-denominated credit almost doubled, from €437 billion to €858 billion.

The growth in dollar credit to EMDEs since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic can be characterised by three distinct phases (Graph 6.A). Between Q1 2020 and Q2 2022, dollar credit to EMDEs grew at an average annual rate of 5.6%. This phase was followed by a period of contraction starting in Q3 2022, amid US monetary tightening. In Q1 2024, annual growth in dollar credit to EMDEs returned to positive territory.

Regional trends varied across these phases. Dollar credit growth to Africa and the Middle East outpaced its counterparts in other regions for almost the entire post-Covid period. Dollar credit growth to emerging Asia aligned with the broader EMDE trend during the first phase but diverged from it thereafter due to a sustained contraction. In contrast, dollar credit growth to emerging Europe accelerated considerably during the last phase.

During the above period, euro credit to EMDEs followed a broadly similar growth trajectory to dollar credit (Graph 6.B). That said, during the most recent phase of expansion, euro credit grew at a notably faster pace. By end-2025, the annual growth rate of euro credit to EMDEs reached 12%, significantly outpacing the 6.2% growth rate observed for dollar credit.

Annex graphs

9  The GLIs cover total foreign currency credit denominated in US dollars, euros or Japanese yen, which includes loans from banks plus outstanding international bonds. This is broader than "bank credit" covered in previous section, which captures banks' loans and their holdings of debt securities.