Fears for next year after a ‘scary’ 2018 for markets

THE year 2018 was miserable for emerging markets (EMs), beset by, among other things, aggressive US interest rate hikes, tariffs and a trade war.

Increasingly aggressive is the withdrawal of liquidity through the automatic unwinding of the Fed’s stimulus bond purchases, which had mostly kept markets bubbling since the 2008 financial crisis. Within this unlucky confluence of factors, markets lately flew into a frenzy over a rapid slowdown in forecasts for global growth.