Emerging markets are battered by a perfect storm

Emerging-market assets were hammered this week, with the benchmark MSCI Emerging Markets index slipping to a two-year low.

Emerging-market assets were hammered this week, with the benchmark MSCI Emerging Markets index slipping to a two-year low. It has lost around 11% in 2015 alone. The JP Morgan Emerging Market Currency index, which measures the most frequently traded developing-country currencies against the dollar, has fallen to its lowest level since inception in 1999.

Recent economic data have reinforced investor bearishness: emerging-market exports recently saw their worst year-on-year decline since 2009, while GDP growth in many southern Asian states has dwindled to post-crisis lows.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.