Asia: a beacon of emerging-market stability?

Emerging Asian markets could ride out the turbulence better than peers in Latin America and elsewhere.

South Korea has kept Covid-19 case numbers low without a strict lockdown © Getty

Investors pulled a record-breaking $83.3bn out of emerging-market stocks and bonds in March, says Dion Rabouin for Axios. That tops similar outflows seen during the global financial crisis or the 2014 “taper tantrum”. There are growing fears that mass bond defaults in the world’s emerging economies are only a matter of weeks away.

The MSCI Emerging Markets index lost almost 24% in the first quarter. Emerging market equities now trade on a 65% discount to US equities, the largest ever, says William Watts for MarketWatch.

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Markets editor

Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019. 

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere. 

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful. 

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.