In particular, a classical Latin American and Caribbean countries (LAC) crisis would show up as an unsustainable disequilibrium between public, private, or foreign savings and investment partially contained by some form of FX control, which turns into a major economic and financial crisis once the currency devaluates. Abundant foreign capital may help prolong the situation for a while, but only to make the inevitable turnaround more damaging. It is important to underscore the role of domestic ER policies. During the upswing, central banks in EMEs often try to curb the resulting appreciation, either through outright currency fixation of heavy FX market intervention. As a number of recent papers have found, these policies tend to reinforce capital flows. 1 When the tide turns, however, these rigid ER regimes are often accompanied by large devaluations, which contribute substantially to insolvency problems in both real and financial domestic sectors. Global financial conditions may thus influence the timing or even the intensity of a domesticallyinduced crisis, but they cannot suppress it altogether. Moreover, such favorable financial conditions usually hit back with a vengeance once local weaknesses reveal themselves. From here we can conclude that appropriate macro policies are necessary to prevent locally-induced cycles, even when powerful global financial forces are at play. The transmission of Global Financial Cycles to EMEs and the role of ER regimes 1  See Maurice Obstfeld, Jonathan D. Ostry, and Mahvash S. Qureshi (2018), “Global Financial Cycles and the Exchange Rate Regime: A Perspective from Emerging Markets,” Discussion Paper #12696, Centre for Economic Policy Research.

This makes the connection between financial flows and economic activity operate through changes in the composition of demand and output, rather than “internal devaluations” which became especially fruitful for several Eurozone and EME countries in the past decade. The role of commodity prices Some EMEs, in particular those with large commodity sectors, may at certain episodes display a decoupling of capital flows from global financing conditions. This seems to have been the case in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, in which the general risk-off attitude contrasted with the relative strength of commodity exporters due to China’s contribution to global growth. Indeed, the quick recovery in energy, food, and metal commodities beginning in 2010 led to a surge in growth and capital inflows to commodity-exporting EMEs that starkly contrasted with the depressed macroeconomic conditions that characterized the slow recovery of AEs. It is tempting to link the decoupling of economic and financial conditions of the 2010-13 episode as a sign that EMEs were beginning to overcome some of their past institutional weaknesses and policy mistakes. But the events triggered by the taper tantrum episode recommend taking this interpretation with a grain of salt. Indeed, such events mark a clear reversal in the outlook of EMEs and the direction of external financing to these economies, once again following closely the downward trend of global commodity prices. 2  See Elías Albagli, Luis Ceballos, Sebastián Claro, and Damián Romero (2018), “Channels of US Monetary Policy Spillovers to International Bonds Markets,” forthcoming, Journal of Financial Economics.