India's rupee has been under pressure since May but the 5 per cent fall in the past week has been precipitous and came in the face of efforts by the central bank to provide support.
The selling has spread to Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, as well as several other emerging nations, including Brazil, South Africa and Turkey.
Last December, when the US Federal Reserve announced its final quantitative easing program involving the purchase of $US85bn in bonds a month, Asian and other emerging nations complained it was exposing their economies to volatile and potentially destabilising capital flows. Brazil's Finance Minister called it a "monetary tsunami".
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke retorted that large capital inflows were the result of undervalued exchange rates in emerging nations and had nothing to do with him. "The perceived advantages of undervaluation and the problem of unwanted capital inflows must be understood as a package -- you can't have one without the other," he said.
But the emerging nations were right. Capital poured into them after the US quantitative easing began and is now draining out just as fast as the Fed prepares to start withdrawing its stimulus.
Lagarde cited estimates that cumulative net flows to emerging markets had risen by $US1.1 trillion since the global financial crisis unleashed waves of unconventional monetary easing by advanced country central banks. She said this was above the long-run structural trend by an estimated $US470bn and had inflated asset markets.
"Corporate leverage and foreign exchange exposures also increased in several cases," she said. "Real estate prices have been buoyant, for exampleÂ….In recent months, some of these developments have been partly reversed."
Â…the research shows a key difference between advanced and emerging countries. For advanced countries, when one form of capital inflow, such as foreign direct investment or bank lending, dries up, another such as portfolio flows rises to replace itÂ….In emerging countries, by contrast, there is a strong correlation between the different forms of capital flow, making them much more exposed to the sort of tidal shift in global capital that is occurring at the moment.
Tidal Shift in Global Capital | The Australian