Indonesia

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Indonesia


Budget balance: -2.0%
Current account: 2.8%
Sovereign credit rating: BB-/Stable
Stock market: -48.3%

How to stop the stock market rout? In Indonesia, the answer is easy: Close the market. Officials halted trading in Jakarta on Oct. 8 after Indonesian shares fell by 21% in thee days. Trading has yet to resume. The country is hurting because investors are hypersensitive to risk, leaving emerging markets such as Indonesia especially vulnerable. Indonesia also continues to suffer from its reputation as a basket-case economy in the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Still, Ai-Ling Ngiam, an analyst in Singapore with Fitch Ratings, says Indonesia has made a lot of progress since then: External debt is just 30% of GDP, compared with 158% in 1997. She also says Indonesia's banks are healthier than Iceland's, and the government has a $57 billion in foreign currency reserves to use in case of emergency.