Emerging Markets and the Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

Over the 1990s, crises developed in emerging markets and, while they did send shockwaves across the world, their effects were perceived mostly by other emerging markets.¹ The domestic and international policy recommendations that followed focused on strategies to reduce this instability, seen as a threat to the world economy. At the end of the 2000s, the world seems to have gone upside down. The 2008/2009 global financial crisis started earlier in 2007 with a sharp rise in defaults on sub-prime mortgages in one of the most advanced nations, the US, and quickly spread through the interbank market to become an international credit and liquidity squeeze. The credit crisis involved other industrial countries first, while emerging markets initially seemed to have ‘decoupled’. Later, however, and expectedly, the crisis developed into a large-scale world crisis and recession.