Emerging market debt: Punishing original sin

Emerging-market corporate debt – the fastest-growing asset class in the world – faces its first stress test, thanks to a surging dollar and rising US yields. As developing countries square up to another possible debt crisis, an increasingly inevitable round of corporate defaults threatens to swamp an illiquid market.

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For the emerging-market debt community, it’s back to the future. Fears over the debt-servicing capacity of Chinese property firms, Ukrainian corporates and Latin American oil producers are rocking the asset class. 

A perfect storm – a relentless surge in the dollar as well as the death of both the commodity super-cycle and US monetary stimulus on steroids – threatens the health of EM economies. Defaults are staging an uptick as the spectre of a cost-of-capital crisis for large swathes of the emerging market private sector looms.

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