IMF: Emerging markets at risk of flight to safety

Lower Latin American growth forecasts

Ilan Goldfajn, head of the IMF’s western hemisphere division, has warned that investors might seek safe haven assets at the expense of emerging markets if market turbulence, like that in the UK bond market, continues.

Goldfajn told the Financial Times that while emerging markets had so far remained resilient this may not last. He added the current disruption in the UK, which has seen government borrowing costs jump to 20-year highs, could become "a more generalised vulnerability so that markets become more disorderly".  "In this world something very important will happen for emerging markets . . . the flight to safety," the IMF head said in an interview while attending meetings in Washington. In a blog on the IMF website published 13 October, Goldfajn and IMF colleagues wrote that while growth mome...