Brazil is next to face the turmoil that has rattled emerging markets and arm-twisted central bankers from India to Argentina into rate hikes. For now it looks like central bank chief Ilan Goldfajn may be able to hold his ground, keeping the key lending rate in Wednesday’s decision-making meeting unchanged. Calls for monetary tightening amid political uncertainty and a 12 percent drop of the real have eased as the central bank stepped up measures to combat currency volatility and the economic...

It may not have been pretty, nor quick, but Brazil’s central bank finally became the latest emerging-market monetary authority to halt its currency’s depreciation. It was the opposite story in Argentina, where the peso sank after authorities announced a $50 billion deal with the International Monetary Fund and stepped back from defending the peso. Brazil’s real rose for the first time in four days, jumping more than 5 percent and leading world gains, after the central bank pledged to flood...

Just how risky is it to trade the Argentine peso these days? One bank says it’s so dangerous that investors shouldn’t even bet against it. "If anything, this is not time to be structurally positioned in ARS assets," BNP Paribas strategists led by Gabriel Gersztein wrote in a report today. The peso, already the world’s worst-performing currency this year, tumbled anew today, dropping as much as 6.1 percent to a record low of 24.1 against the dollar. Given the unidirectional trade, unabated for...

Peer-to-peer trading growth in developing world outpaced U.S. Central banks have been warning of risks of virtual currencies Bitcoin trading expanded faster this year in emerging markets than developed ones -- and quickest of all in places where authorities tried to crack down. Somewhere, Satoshi Nakamoto is smiling. After all, avoiding bank and government oversight, and sidestepping the eroding effects of inflation, was what Nakamoto had in mind when he (or she, or they) created bitcoin in...