The paper examines the extent of the current global crisis and the contagion effects
it induces by conducting an empirical investigation of the extreme financial interde-
pendences of some selected emerging markets with the US. Several copula functions
that provide the necessary flexibility to capture the dynamic patterns of fat tail as
well as linear and nonlinear interdependences are used to model the degree of cross-
market linkages. Using daily return data from Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC
markets) and the US, our empirical results show strong evidence of time-varying
dependence between each of the BRIC markets and the US markets, but the depen-
dency is stronger for commodity-price dependent markets than for finished-product
export-oriented markets. We also observe high levels of dependence persistence for
all market pairs during both bullish and bearish markets.