It is not so long ago that many emerging economies, especially those in Latin America, were complaining bitterly about “currency wars”. A decade-long commodity price boom, combined with ultra-loose western monetary
policy, flooded the emerging world with capital and pushed up exchange rates to wildly overvalued levels.
Those days are over. International tensions with Russia, concerns about China’s financial stability, a strengthening US economy and, most of all, fast-falling commodity prices have prompted foreign capital to head for the exit. During the past three months, the JPMorgan index of emerging market currencies has fallen by almost