Earlier this year, one of the great hopes for the world economy dodging the bullet of America's subprime mortgage meltdown was the robust growth in developing economies — and the hope that the consumer markets they generated at home would take up the slack as Western consumers were forced to tighten their belts.

But the financial crisis that started with homeowners walking away from mortgages on Main Street, U.S.A., has begun to roil the teeming bazaars of Islamabad, the old-world neighborhoods of Budapest and the gleaming office towers of São Paulo. Countries are now lining up, tin cups in hand, seeking bailouts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). And the line is lengthening. Iceland got $2 billion; Ukraine, $16.5 billion. Hungary needs $12.5 billion, and then there's nuclear-armed Pakistan, perhaps the world's most combustible country, which needs up to $15 billion to stave off potential financial collapse. So dangerous is the situation in Pakistan that the government has to hold negotiations with IMF officials in Dubai — the IMF declared Pakistan off-limits for its personnel after a bomb ripped through the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad last month. Pakistan has just six days before its dwindling foreign-exchange reserves run out, the Foreign Minister told his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, on Tuesday. Steinmeier helpfully suggested that because the situation in Pakistan was so difficult, the IMF ought to expedite negotiations over the bailout that are set to conclude next month.

"A year ago, it was the emerging markets that were carrying the world," says an IMF official. "Boy is that over." In fact, countries like Russia and Kazakhstan that just six months ago were fat and happy on a diet of petro dollars are now burning through national "rainy day" funds and bailing out banks that had only peripheral exposure to subprime mortgages. Their problem now is foreign-equity investors — hedge funds in particular — stampeding for the exits.