Is Indonesia Facing a Currency Collapse?

Is Indonesia Facing a Currency Collapse? - at www.moneyweek.com - the best of the international financial media

Indonesia has hiked its key interest rate by 0.75% to "a two-year high" of 9.5%, says Bloomberg, to "halt a plunge" in its currency, the Indonesian rupiah. The higher rates are meant to "stem the flow of capital out of the nation", which saw the currency fall by as much as 15% against the dollar in the past three weeks.

State subsidies of fuel prices are behind the problem. Indonesia is the only member of oil cartel Opec which is a net oil importer, and the recent surge in oil prices has pushed up the cost of government hand-outs.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.