Since April, when the dollar finally shook off the stigma from America’s deteriorating fiscal outlook on the way to rallying behind hawkish Fed policy and a favorable shift in rate differentials, questions about the resiliency of emerging markets have popped up time and again.
“Monetary stimulus by the Fed and other advanced economies played a relatively limited role in the surge of capital flows to (emerging market economies) in recent years”, Jerome Powell said, at an IMF/SNB event in early May, before contending that “there is good reason to think that the normalization of monetary policy in advanced economies should continue to prove manageable for EMEs.”
While it’s too early to say whether Powell will proven definitively wrong, Q2 was the worst quarter for emerging market equities and FX since 2015. The Fed continued to tighten and seemed generally unmoved by the protestations of, for instance, the RBI’s Urjit Patel, who in an Op-Ed for FT suggested Powell should calibrate the pace of balance sheet normalization to account for increased Treasury supply or risk choking off liquidity to the rest of the dollar bond market.
On May 30, in “I Know You Want To, But Don’t Ignore This Out-Of-Cycle Wednesday Rate Hike“, we suggested folks shouldn’t discount the importance of Bank Indonesia’s inter-meeting hike. The move came less than two weeks after BI hiked for the first time since 2014, amid an acute slide in the rupiah, falling stock prices and rising bond yields. That move suggested new Governor Perry Warjiyo is pretty serious about staying ahead of the game. On June 6, he echoed the RBI’s Patel in warning the Fed to be cautious. Here’s what he told Bloomberg, in an interview:
We know every country must decide their policy based on domestic circumstances but look, you have to take account of your actions and the impact of your actions to other countries, especially the emerging markets.
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