Virus Return a Scourge Once More as Markets Wake Up to Risks
- MSCI Asia Pacific Index is underperforming global peers
- India’s rupee is the worst-performing Asian currency in April
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Just as Asia’s riskier assets looked set to benefit from an acceleration in the global recovery, the coronavirus has once again thrown a spanner in the works.
As new infections in the region shoot past global peers, the MSCI Asia Pacific Index has fallen out of the relative uptrend it had been in since September and underperformed the MSCI World Index by over six percentage points since the beginning of March. The Indian rupee, Japanese yen and Malaysian ringgit have all weakened between 1% and 2% since the end of February amid a resurgence in cases, while the Thai baht is down a whopping 3.7% over the same period.