The annual meeting of EMTA, formerly the Emerging Market Traders Association, has for the past few years been an exercise in watching analysts berate themselves for not being sufficiently bullish about the previous year. The 2005 meeting was no exception: no one thought, a year ago, that emerging-market debt would return anything like the 9% it ended up posting over the course of the year.
More to the point, the hot new asset class of 2005, local markets, was a bit of a dud, returning a mere 2.5%. Everybody at the meeting agreed that local markets were the way of the future. Joyce Chang,...
