Emerging markets look unusually resilient

is familiar. A Federal Reserve bent on taming inflation . The dollar soars, global financial conditions tighten and the world economy falls . But this time, there is a twist. Where writers would normally pencil in an emerging-markets crisis, there is instead an eerie calm.For decades, fast-growing middle-income countries have been a source of financial trouble. In the early 1980s, the Fed’s crusade against double-digit inflation sparked a Latin American debt crisis; in the 2010s, the normalisation of policy after the global financial crisis rattled the “fragile five” (Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey). Much the same might have been expected during present tightening, which is the most intense since the early 1980s. In forecasts published on October 11th, the again marked down its projections for global growth, and warned that economies accounting for a third of global are heading for downturns. The world’s very poorest countries are on the ropes. More than a billion people live in economies now facing severe distress.