Fault Lines: An Investigation into Debt, Leverage, and the Road to Next Global Financial Crisis

Global debt just hit a record $353 trillion. The ten largest companies in the S&P 500 now make up a larger share of the index than at the peak of the dot-com bubble. And the mechanism that briefly crashed global markets in August 2024 - the yen carry trade - remains, by regulators' own admission, too large and too opaque to measure.None of this guarantees a crisis. Fault Lines doesn't predict one. What it does is something more useful: it investigates, chapter by chapter, whether the specific conditions that have historically preceded systemic financial crises are accumulating in the system right now - and it shows you exactly where to look.Financial journalist and chartered accountant Hemant Saraf spent months tracing the connections between nine major fault lines in the global financial system: American equity concentration, Chinese local-government debt, European political fragility, Japanese carry-trade funding, opaque private credit markets, and more - testing each one against a century of financial history, from 1929 through 2008 to the present.Inside, you'll find: - The actual mechanics behind every major crash since 1929 - leverage, maturity mismatch, and contagion, explained in plain language- A fault-by-fault investigation of the United States, China, Europe, Japan, and India- The shadow banking and private credit markets few regulators fully see- Four evidence-based scenarios for how 2027 could unfold - each with its own probability range, honestly labeled as judgment, not fact- A 24-indicator "Global Crash Dashboard" you can use to track the real data yourself, in real time- What actually happens to markets, households, and governments if the system does break - grounded in what happened in 2008 and 2020, not speculationEvery major question in this book gets two honest hearings - the bull case and the bear case - because the goal isn't to manufacture a dramatic conclusion. It's to give serious readers, investors, and business owners a genuine framework for understanding systemic risk, built from primary sources: the IMF, the Federal Reserve, the Bank for International Settlements, the RBI, and more.The trigger is nearly unknowable. The vulnerability is not. Fault Lines shows you how to tell the difference - and how to watch for it yourself, long after you've finished the book.