A barrage of shocks is building that is unlike anything emerging markets have had to confront since the 1990s, when a series of rolling crises sank economies and toppled governments.
Turmoil triggered by rising food and energy prices is already gripping countries such as Sri Lanka, Egypt, Tunisia and Peru. It risks turning into a broader debt debacle and yet another threat to the world economy’s fragile recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Compounding the danger is the most aggressive monetary tightening campaign that the US Federal Reserve has embarked on in two decades. Rising US interest rates mean a jump in debt-servicing costs for developing nations — right after they borrowed billions to fight COVID-19 — and tend to spur capital outflows. And on top of it all is the stark reality that war in Europe, which is driving the latest food and energy shock, shows few signs of ending.
Illustration: Mountain People
The cocktail of risks has already pushed Sri Lanka to the brink of default on its bonds.
A handful of other emerging economies, from Pakistan and Tunisia to Ethiopia and Ghana, are in immediate danger of following suit, Bloomberg Economics has reported.
Of course, the developing world’s commodity exporters stand to benefit from higher prices. Still, there are other troubles brewing, with a new COVID-19 outbreak locking down key cities in China, and growing angst that Europe and the US will fall into recession.
The world’s top economic policymakers are sounding the alarm. The dominant themes at the spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington last week were a slowing global economy and the rising risks — seen and unseen — facing developing nations.
The IMF, in its latest World Economic Outlook, likened the war’s impact to “seismic waves” rolling over the global economy. It also warned of the possible return in emerging markets of the sort of “doom loop” that led Russia to default in 1998, helping make Vladimir Putin Russia’s president and taking hedge fund Long Term Capital Management to the verge of collapse.
The World Bank slashed its global growth forecast and announced the creation of a US$170 billion rescue package — bigger than its COVID-19 response — for crisis-hit nations.
“We can see this train wreck coming towards us,” said John Lipsky, who spent half a decade as No. 2 at the IMF.
The combination of real-economy shocks and financial-market tightening is “going to push a large number of low-income countries into the need for debt restructuring,” Lipsky said.
The biggest default looming in emerging economies is in Russia, where Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has brought sanctions, economic isolation and a pledge to pay debts only in rubles — which would likely be ruled a breach of commitments, triggering losses for investors.
Still, Russia’s role as the sanctions-hit aggressor make it a unique case, which means that Sri Lanka, for now, is at the vanguard of the potentially broader crisis.
The country’s currency is down nearly 40 percent this year. Last week, it suspended foreign debt payments, deciding to use what is left of its reserves to cover food and energy imports rather than pay investors.
For people like Jagath Gunasena, the crisis has already arrived. It has meant sending his wife and son to stand for hours to refill the cooking-gas cylinder they need to run their Colombo food stall — only to see them turned away when supplies run out.
“At least we have leftovers from our food stall to eat,” Gunasena said. “I don’t know how the others will find ways to cook or get by.”
That kind of uncertainty has driven protesters to call for Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign even as his government tries to negotiate with the IMF and Asian powers such as China and India for assistance.
Sri Lanka might be the first, but it is not alone. Thirteen emerging countries have bonds trading at least 1,000 basis points above US Treasuries, up from six last year. Credit-default swaps on developing-country debt spiked in the first weeks of the Ukraine war, showing a growing fear of default — and while they have since retreated, they are still about 90 basis points above last year’s average.
TURKEY, EGYPT
Bloomberg Economics, which keeps scorecards of the building risks for emerging market countries, puts Turkey and Egypt at the top of the list of major emerging markets exposed to “economic and financial spillovers” from the Ukraine war.
It ranks Tunisia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Ghana and El Salvador — with large debt stocks and borrowing costs that have risen by more than 700 basis points since 2019 — among countries in immediate danger of being unable to repay debts.
The direct impact of a default in five countries such as these on the global economy would be small, but crises in the developing world have a history of spreading well beyond their starting points.
“In a cascade of emerging-market credit events, the negative impact of the whole could be larger than the sum of the parts,” wrote Ziad Daoud, Bloomberg Economics’ lead economist for emerging markets.
The World Bank said that 60 percent of low-income countries are in debt distress already, or at high risk of it.
So far, the trouble is brewing in the sort of “off the radar screen” places that investors do not pay much attention to, said Carmen Reinhart, the World Bank’s lead economist.
That does not mean it will stay that way.
Reinhart cited the example of Long Term Capital Management, which was bailed out in 1998 due to losses in Russia and other emerging markets.
“That wasn’t necessarily on anyone’s radar screen,” she said. “Those things start to surface. Exposures are opaque.”
Governments all over the emerging world stepped up their borrowing to cushion the impact of the pandemic.
The cost of servicing those debts is rising “on a steep incline,” the IMF said.
A record amount of that debt is now held on balance sheets of local banks in emerging economies, the IMF said — raising the risk of a feedback loop in which banks are forced to pull back on lending as economies slow and the value of the government bonds that they own falls. Which in turn might lead to the sort of economic “doom loop” that drove Russia to default in 1998 and Argentina to a similar fate a few years later.
The increase in borrowing costs is likely to get steeper still as the Fed’s efforts to combat inflation at home lead to higher interest rates on US Treasuries, the benchmark for many developing economies.
Central banks across much of the emerging world are raising their own policy rates, too, as prices surge.
Jim O’Neill, a former Goldman Sachs economist who coined the term BRICs in the early 2000s to describe the then fast-growing emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China, said that the current environment is the most uncertain he has seen since he began his career in finance in the early 1980s.
“If we get the inflation risk persisting and central banks have to tighten policy, for certain emerging markets it will be a disaster,” O’Neill said.
One sign of trouble ahead is the lengthening line of countries in rescue talks with the IMF.
Along with Sri Lanka, it includes countries with similar balance-of-payments problems such as Egypt and Tunisia, where food prices helped drive regime change just a decade ago.
In Pakistan, high inflation and geopolitical tensions combined to oust Imran Khan as prime minister this month, while the government is cutting electricity to households and industry because it cannot afford to buy coal or natural gas from abroad to fuel its power plants.
TUNISIA
In Tunisia, the cradle of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, a cash-strapped government has raised fuel prices at least four times in the past 13 months. Tourism has dried up, and shortages are spreading to the point where market vendors joke that marijuana is easier to buy than flour.
Raed, a 26-year-old baker, said he cannot get enough flour on the black market at prices far above the official, subsidized one to keep his shop open.
“The situation is very bad,” he said.
So he has decided that once Ramadan is over, he will join the legions of migrants trying their luck elsewhere.
In Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, the disappearance from the market of supplies from Russia and Ukraine has hit hard. Last month, the Central Bank of Egypt let the currency weaken more than 15 percent in a matter of hours and hiked its benchmark rate for the first time in five years amid an outflow of hard currency.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has urged people to make do with not-so-lavish meals when they break their Ramadan fast.
The government “is asking us to ration our consumption, but we’ve already been doing this,” said Ezzat Mohamed, who lives in Qalyubiya Province, where stores have begun offering food on credit.
To be sure, many developing nations sell more commodities than they buy, and benefit from rising prices. They are typically a boon in regions such as Latin America, for example, where Brazil’s real is the world’s best-performing major currency this year and Chile’s exports last month were up more than 20 percent from a year earlier.
Robin Brooks, lead economist at the Washington-based Institute for International Finance, said that the fallout from the Ukraine war would likely be mostly limited to food and energy importers.
Busts often follow booms — and there have not been many of the latter in an emerging world that has had a rough ride amid the pandemic, Brooks said.
By contrast, the crises of the 1990s erupted in economies where capital had been pouring in, and its abrupt departure revealed flaws in corporate balance sheets, he said.
Even with risks rising because of an increasingly aggressive Fed, “I’m not as worried as others about skeletons in the closet,” he said.
However, if the pandemic backdrop leaves emerging countries less vulnerable to capital outflows, the opposite is true when it comes to social tensions.
That is one reason that it is hard not to see something broader in the political and economic turmoil starting to hit the poorest corners of the global economy.
Oxfam has warned that more than 250 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty this year.
Latin America’s commodity exporters are not immune from political unrest — Peru, with one of the world’s highest COVID-19 death rates, has been rocked by weeks of violent protests — or even a weakening of their external position.
Peru’s current-account balance swung from a surplus of 0.8 percent of GDP at the end of 2020 to a deficit of 2.8 percent a year later. In Colombia and Chile, deficits widened to about 6 and 7 percent of GDP respectively in the final quarter of last year.
Foreign investors also own a majority of those countries’ sovereign debt, which has ballooned by 10 to 15 percentage points of GDP over the past two years, Gavekal Research wrote in a recent note.
“Emerging market asset prices — including those of commodity exporters — may be a lot more vulnerable to swings in the external environment than is currently assumed by investors,” its economists wrote.
In Brazil, less than six months ahead of presidential elections, opinion polls show that 75 percent of the public blames Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s government for a surging cost of living.
Although the Central Bank of Brazil is months into an aggressive tightening campaign, Brazil’s inflation rate was still 11.3 percent last month.
The problem is that, as in many parts of the world, prices feed off each other and higher fuel costs make food more expensive too, said Thais Zara, an economist at LCA Consultores in Sao Paulo.
Bolsonaro is using a commodities windfall to expand cash aid to poor people ahead of the election and has pumped US$32 billion of credit into the economy.
However, in Rio de Janeiro’s markets, the anxiety about what lies ahead remains real.
Maria Conceicao loaded up on fish for her family ahead of Easter celebrations this month.
“We’ll celebrate with fish now, but will have less later,” she said.
Because for Conceicao, like millions of others in the developing world, the grim reality is: “Each month gets worse.”
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