Archived Series > World Economic and Financial Surveys
Abstract
This paper presents the international financial markets aspects of the current turbulence in emerging markets. The ongoing international diversification of institutional portfolios, the return of flight capital, and the cyclical developments in industrial countries combined to generate a significant volume of capital flows into emerging markets in the developing world. In keeping with developments in global markets, these flows have increasingly been in the form of purchases of tradable bonds, equities, and money market instruments—securities that can readily be sold when sentiments change. The volume of financial wealth that can flee a developing country is now sufficiently large that it can overwhelm any attempt to maintain an exchange rate incompatible with fundamentals. Thus the possibility for investors—domestic and foreign—to exert discipline over policy has strengthened significantly. The resolution of sovereign debt-servicing difficulties has become more complicated with the changes in instruments and participants in international markets.
Abstract
This paper discusses systematic issues in international finance explained in the International Capital Markets report. The paper describes that the nature and extent of recent banking problems in several industrial countries along with the policy responses to those problems. It is observed that balance sheet problems in banking are widespread among the major industrial countries. The paper also analyses recent activity in the European currency unit bond and exchange markets, and reviews developments in the private financing of developing countries and discusses several issues raised by the recent experience, including the broadening of the investor base for developing country securities, the special role played by regional financial centers in East and Southeast Asia, and the systemic implications of the evolving pattern of developing country financing. A key influence on international capital movements in recent years was the rising international diversification of investment portfolios, which is generally believed to have increased in response to the liberalization of exchange and capital controls in many industrial countries in the 1970s and 1980s.
Abstract
This paper assesses recent trends in international capital markets. It reviews, in particular, the forces currently reshaping the markets of industrial countries and confronting financial institutions with major challenges. For the international capital markets, 1988 was generally a year of recovery. The international securities markets, depressed during the second and third quarters of 1987 and badly shaken by the October market break, rebounded in 1988. Intensifying competition and changing regulatory requirements characterize contemporary financial markets. Competition has been fostered by the internationalization of institutions, the liberalization of domestic markets, technological advances in data processing and telecommunications, and financial product innovations that more extensively link traditional banking and securities markets. A fundamental task of financial intermediaries is to appraise and assume risk and to charge for it appropriately. As a result of regulatory change, the growth of derivative product markets, and technological innovation, competitive pressure appears to be increasing the general level of risk assumed by intermediaries, while only partially providing the tools needed to manage that risk.