WASHINGTON (AP) — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is blaming the United States for Turkey's financial crisis, ignoring homegrown problems like high debts, raging inflation and his own erratic policies.

Yet one of the threats facing Turkey and other emerging-market countries really is made-in-America: By ratcheting up U.S. interest rates, the Federal Reserve has — unintentionally — led investors to pull money out of emerging markets like Turkey, strengthened the dollar's value and made it harder for foreign companies to repay their dollar-denominated debts.

The resulting flight of capital into safer and higher-yielding U.S. investments has sent many emerging-market currencies tumbling. The MSCI Emerging Markets Currency Index has sunk nearly 8 percent since early March.

Especially vulnerable are countries with weak economic fundamentals: Runaway inflation, bulging trade deficits, piles of foreign debt and paltry foreign-currency reserves available to intervene in the markets to help prop up their own currencies.

Turkey is Exhibit A: Inflation is running near 16 percent a year. The country buys much more than it sells abroad. Its borrowing binge has left Turkey highly vulnerable. Erdogan has rattled global investors by pressuring the country's central bank not to raise interest rates — the conventional response to high inflation. High interest rates normally help strengthen a nation's currency. But they also tend to slow economic growth, something Erdogan clearly wants to avoid.