Emerging market equities have not had a congenial summer. Since Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, broached the subject of tapering the Fed’s asset purchasing programme back in May, they have notably underperformed developed world equities. It looks suspiciously as though the emerging market growth story is tarnished.
The story was, in truth, over-hyped. The suggestion emerging markets could somehow decouple from the developed world and deliver self-sustaining high growth rates for the forseeable future was always a nonsense. With the developed world now experiencing mediocre sub-trend growth the nonsense has become palpable, most notably in Europe where the travails of the eurozone have hurt the emerging market economies of central and eastern Europe, together with Turkey.
Not only that: emerging markets other than China face the problem they cannot decouple from China either. As the new Chinese administration tries to rebalance the world’s second-largest economy away from excessive reliance on investment towards increased consumption, Asian manufacturers in Taiwan and Korea are feeling the heat. So, too, with commodity producers such as Australia. The decline from double digit Chinese growth rates to the current seven per cent combined with the risk of a hard landing means these trade linkages are becoming uncomfortable. The so-called commodity supercycle, driven substantially by China’s investment boom, is surely over.