Lenders to highly indebted companies are making many of the same mistakes that undermined the US subprime mortgage market, suggesting that leveraged loans will become “tomorrow’s problem”, says the chief executive of BlackRock, the $1,000bn-plus fund management group.

The comments from Larry Fink highlight the rising debt levels, falling risk premiums and loosening standards in loans made to leveraged buy-out vehicles and other junk-rated groups.

“If I was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, I’d be paying more attention to that because, to me, this is going to be tomorrow’s problem,” Mr Fink said in an interview with the Financial Times. “Standards have deteriorated to levels that we never even dreamed that we would see.”

His comments coincided with a warning on Wednesday from the Bank of England, which said that the surge in cheap corporate lending, combined with looser credit standards, “has increased the vulnerability of the [global financial] system”.

Mr Fink said problems in the subprime mortgage market could worsen but there were no signs of “contagion” in other markets. Lax subprime lending standards, particularly in 2006, have caused a spike in defaults and late payments.

The biggest reason for weakening lending standards is plentiful liquidity and consequent strong investor demand, Mr Fink said.

He said he was also worried that so many investors are moving into illiquid “alternative” investments such as hedge funds and private equity, a potential concern in any downturn.

Aggressive lending is also supporting the private equity industry, and Mr Fink said any credit slump would have a knock-on effect on private equity groups such as Blackstone .

He said Blackstone, where he once worked, was highly diversified and “uniquely qualified” to go public. But he added there was a private equity “bubble”, albeit not on the scale of the internet run-up of the late 1990s, and questioned whether it was the right time for most private equity firms to go public.