It’s been nearly three decades since Antoine van Agtmael coined the term “emerging market” to describe the waking giants of the developing world. During that time, we’ve come to think of emerging markets—including the so-called BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China—as immature states in which political factors matter at least as much as economic fundamentals for the performance of markets. As globalization came to seem more and more like a historical inevitability, the assumption among wealthy nations was that the injection of politics was a temporary stage, that these developing economies would mature (each at its own tempo) into a state of grace in which economic balances, not politics, would drive local markets.

The financial crisis has turned this assumption on its head. Today, political battles weigh on economic policy making, even in the world’s richest economies. Nowhere is this shift more obvious than in Washington, DC, where debates over bailouts for the auto industry, new financial rules, and individual elements of a $787 billion stimulus package have become fodder for the partisan political blogosphere and have created complicated sets of risks and potential rewards for lawmakers and investors alike.