With Janet Yellen taking over the reins from Ben Bernanke as the new Chair of the Federal Reserve, a number of events and increasing tensions in emerging markets, including Eastern Europe, remind us of the vulnerability of the recovery (or as described by the Economist, the “worldwide wobble”).
At the source of the economic weakness, we are witnessing across emerging markets the traces of a credit cycle gone too far and, slowly but surely, coming to an end. The financial media is full of new acronyms, for example the “Fragile Five” (recently “upgraded” by the Financial Times to the “Fragile Eight”).