The easy money policies of the US and Japanese central banks are inspiring worried talk of “currency wars”. The fear is that newly printed dollars and yen will flood into fast-growing emerging markets, driving up their currency values, undermining their exports and creating local asset bubbles. In this analysis, emerging market leaders are fighting in vain to hold back a destructive tide.
It is true that capital chases growth, but the big emerging economies are slowing. Far from fighting off a deluge of foreign capital, leaders from India to South Africa are struggling to attract a greater share of global capital flows in order to fund widening current account deficits. Over the past decade, the foreign exchange reserves of the developing world grew at an average annual rate of
25 per cent, swelling from $570bn in 2000 to $7tn in 2011. But over the past year, the average rate slowed to a crawl of barely 5 per cent.