On November 12, Business Monitor International hosted a major investors’ conference on the risks, opportunities and outlook for emerging markets over the coming decade. Justin Patrie talks with senior BMI strategists Terry Alexander and Tim Cooper about some of the themes and surprises that emerged from the conference. Highlighted topics include EM outperformance, structural drivers [Read more...]

 

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On Monday, November 9, much of Europe will be celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the catalyst it provided for the collapse of Communism on the continent. BMI’s Justin Patrie explains the significance of this event for Emerging Europe, and what the outlook is for the next 20 years [Read more...]

 

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Now that Sri Lanka’s civil war is over and the Tamil Tigers’ leaders have been eliminated, President Percy Mahinda Rajapaksa will have to turn his attention to winning the peace. This may actually be harder than winning the war. For a start, the government will need to reintegrate the Tamil minority – of which more [Read more...]

Business Monitor’s recent downward revision of its 2009 Hungarian economic growth forecast to -6.4% well reflects my view that the systemic crisis risks I have been highlighting since Q308 have morphed into the region’s core scenario. While small economies like the Baltics and frontier markets such as Ukraine have long been forecast to contract in [Read more...]

One noteworthy aspect of the current global financial crisis has been the lack of coordinated international action by emerging nations. The G7 swung into action last week to deal with their own concerns, but there has not been a similar coordinated response from the world’s leading emerging markets – China, India, Brazil, Russia, Korea, et [Read more...]

Question: Which country would you feel safer investing in, South Korea or Pakistan? Most people would probably say Korea, but judging by the performance of their currencies this year, the answer is not so clear cut. Every night lately, just before drifting off to sleep, I’ve found myself wondering where the Korean won would be [Read more...]

Might the US go cap in hand to foreign powers for a bailout from its financial woes? That was an in idea mooted by Kenichi Ohmae in the Financial Times yesterday. He proposed that the US ask for up to US$5 trillion from the world’s major economic powers to set up a credit line to [Read more...]