Foreigners dumped $12.3b in emerging market assets in May

A heavy sell-off in emerging markets last month saw foreigners dump a combined $12.3 billion of bonds and stocks, figures from the Institute of International Finance showed on Tuesday. The IIF said outflows were evenly split between debt and equity markets while regionally the biggest moves were $8 billion out of Asia and $4.7 billion from Africa and the Middle East combined.

There was selling at the end of April too, making this the second longest selloff for emerging markets on the IIF's records. The longest followed the election of US President Donald Trump in November 2016. “No single driver of outflows from EM assets stands out,” the IIF's analysts said in their report.

“Instead, a combination of factors appears to be at work: idiosyncratic domestic strains such as funding pressures in Argentina and Turkey or the truckers' strike in Brazil, renewed US tariff threats and retaliatory actions; and political uncertainty in Italy and Spain.”