In the eighties, it was Aussie farmers. In 1998, it was Indonesian noodle makers. In 2008, it was Icelandic car-buyers and Chinese steelmakers. In 2010, it was Hungarian homeowners. In 2011-12, it’s Indian car-makers. Yep, foreign currency loan explosions are back.
In not-unrelated news, here’s a rather good IMF paper on the spate of leveraged-FX-hedging EM corporate blowups in 2008, and what could be done to prevent them in future. (The most alarming is the inverse leveraged snowball AUDJPY CCS – look on page 14 – that ended up locking in an AUDJPY spot rate of 600. Not a typo: six hundred.)