JAKARTA — Higher long-term interest rates in the United States as the Federal Reserve signaled it might change its policies were already causing hardship for millions of businesses and workers in emerging markets from Indonesia and India to Turkey and Brazil.
But the economic slowdowns and falling currencies precipitated by capital flight back to the United States seem less severe so far than other recent downturns.
The impact may be further dampened because the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy-making committee concluded its meeting Wednesday saying it would not retreat from its long-running stimulus campaign of buying $85 billion a month in bonds.
Emerging markets around the globe had been feeling the effects of investors’ expectations that the American central bank would begin tightening monetary policy as the American economy improves. As long-term interest rates have risen this summer in the United States on bets that the Fed will begin tapering its bond purchases, institutions and rich individuals have shifted tens of billions of dollars out of emerging markets. They have been moving them into dollar-based investments that offer higher yields. The flight of dollars caused currencies to fall against the dollar.
But the Fed’s announcement Wednesday afternoon took currency traders by surprise and the dollar plunged against major currencies. The dollar fell a little more than 1 percent against the euro and the yen after the announcement giving companies in the developing economies a little more breathing room.At the IGP Group, Indonesia’s dominant manufacturer of car and truck axles, sales plummeted 95 percent and stayed down for six months when the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997. Four-fifths of the company’s workers lost their jobs.
When the global financial crisis began in 2008, IGP’s sales briefly dropped by nearly a third, and a quarter of the employees were put out of work as temporary workers’ contracts were not renewed.
The latest downturn, which began in early August, has been much more modest. IGP’s axle shipments are down 10 percent in the past month from a year ago. The company’s work force has barely shrunk, to 2,000 from 2,077 at the end of July, though it plans to reach 1,900 by the end of this year.
“These are challenging times, but I don’t think they will be the same as in 2008 or 1998,” Kusharijono, IGP’s operations director, who uses only one name, yelled over a clanking, cream-colored assembly line here for minivan rear axles.
Business leaders and economists across the developing world expect emerging markets to face tougher times in the months and maybe even years ahead. Emre Deliveli, a Turkish economic consultant and columnist, said, “Even if all goes well and emerging markets end up rallying, the era of easy money and abundant capital flows will officially be over on Sept. 18,” when the two-day Fed meeting ends.
But while previous exoduses by investors from volatile emerging markets have caused waves of bank failures, corporate bankruptcies and mass layoffs, the latest retrenchment has been much milder so far.
That partly reflects the belief that when the Fed does move, it will very gradually scale back its bond purchases, business leaders and economists around the world said in interviews this week. The effects have also been limited partly because banks and companies and their regulators in many emerging markets have become much more careful about borrowing in dollars over the past two decades, except when they expect dollar revenue with which to repay these debts.In 1997 and 1998, “the whole problem began with the banking sector. Now I think the banking sector is much better,” said Sofjan Wanandi, a tycoon who is the chairman of the Indonesian Employers’ Association and part owner of IGP.
Trading in currency and stock markets seems to suggest that some of the worst fears over the summer are starting to recede. The Brazilian real has recovered about 8 percent of its value against the dollar since Aug. 21 and a little over a third of its losses since the start of May, when worries began to spread in financial markets about the vulnerability of emerging markets to a tightening of monetary policy. Stock markets from India to South Africa have rallied from lows in late August, with Johannesburg’s market up 14.7 percent since late June after a swoon earlier than most emerging markets.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/business/global/emerging-markets-bracing-as-fed-meets.html?partner=rss&emc=rss