The three Baltic economies of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have been the biggest losers of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, contracting by 14.1%, 14.8% and a whopping 18.0% in 2009 respectively. After overheating in the preceding three years (Latvia grew on average 10.9% between 2005 and 2007), tightening global credit conditions towards the tail-end of… [Read more]

As the rally in the more common emerging market assets starts to look shaky, I see a number of reasons to like what’s on offer in frontier markets, Africa in particular. To my mind, the two assets that really stand out are Nigerian equities, and the Ugandan shilling. In the case of Nigerian stocks, I… [Read more]

‘Islamic banks have withstood the recent turmoil in the global banking industry triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis because their rules do not allow dealings in products like derivatives, options or papers that caused the meltdown.’ At least that’s what I keep reading in the media. And it’s a fair point. If the credit crunch… [Read more]

Amid all the hullabaloo over massive second quarter profits at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, I think it worthwhile to point out that it isn’t just US banks that are performing well. Turkish banks reported huge net profit gains in Q109, even as the domestic economy contracted by a whopping 13.8% y-o-y. To give… [Read more]

As a foreign investor, you couldn’t have done much worse than investing in the Nigerian stock market in 2009 (OK, you could have bought Zimbabwe dollars). With the Lagos All-Share Index down 27.5% since January 1, it’s the worst performing equity index in the world so far this year. Add to that a 9.2% drop… [Read more]

Literally within minutes of returning from an emerging Europe investment conference where the ad nauseam theme was that the ‘economic fundamentals are essentially sound’, I learn that the National Bank of Hungary has hiked its policy rate from 8.5% to 11.5% to prop up the currency. Well, the fundamentals must be sound if a central… [Read more]