While the corporate side of global capital markets is recovering well, another side that suffered in the crisis is still ailing so badly it is a drag on the US economic recovery as a whole. Mortgage-backed securities may have got a bad name in 2007-2008, but some way to revive the structured finance market must be devised to get the housing market out of the doldrums.

Corporations around the world issued $2.1 trillion dollars of new bonds in the first half of this year, according to Dealogic, setting a record. The issues included corporate investment-grade, high-yield and financial industry bonds. Corporate new issues of stock (including a big increase in IPOs) also increased over the first half of 2013, to $489 billion, a 20% improvement. So global capital markets are on track to provide about $5 trillion of corporate finance in 2014.