The contributors provide an overview of developments in the affected countries during the 1997 Asian financial crisis; lessons learned and corrective measures taken; lessons learned by regional and international actors; how domestic, regional, and international politics have affected the outcomes; the identification of potential future problems, and levels of preparedness.

In the late 1990s, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia experienced a series of major financial crises evinced by widespread bank insolvencies and currency depreciations, as well as sharp declines in gross domestic production. This sudden disruption of the Asian economic `miracle' astounded many observers around the world, raised questions about the stability of the international financial system and caused widespread fear that this financial crisis would spread to other countries. What has been called the Asian crisis followed a prolonged slump in Japan dating from the early 1980s and came after the Mexican currency crisis in the mid-1990s. Thus, the Asian crisis became a major policy concern at the International Monetary Fund as well as among developed countries whose cooperation in dealing with such financial crises is necessary to maintain the stability and efficiency of global financial markets. This book collects the papers and discussions delivered at an October 1998 Conference co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the International Monetary Fund to examine the causes, implications and possible solutions to the crises. The conference participants included a broad range of academic, industry, and regulatory experts representing more than thirty countries. Topics discussed included the origin of the individual crises; early warning indicators; the role played by the global financial sector in this crisis; how, given an international safety net, potential risks of moral hazard might contribute to further crises; the lessons for the international financial system to be drawn from the Asian crisis; and what the role of the International Monetary Fund might be in future rescue operations. Because the discussions of these topics include a wide diversity of critical views and opinions, the book offers a particularly rich presentation of current and evolving thinking on the causes and preventions of international banking and monetary crises. The book promises to be one of the timeliest as well as one of the most complete treatments of the Asian financial crisis and its implications for future policymaking.

The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 shook the foundations of the global economy. What began as a localized currency crisis soon engulfed the entire Asian region. What went wrong and how did the Asian economies, long considered "miracles," respond? How did the United States, Japan and other G-7 countries react to the crisis? What role did the IMF play? Why did China remain conspicuously insulated from the turmoil raging in its midst? What lessons can be learnt from the crisis by other emerging economies? This book provides answers to all the above questions and more. It gives a comprehensive account of how the international economic order operates, examines its strengths and weaknesses, and what needs to be done to fix it. The book will be vital to students of economics, international political economy, Asian and development studies.

The turmoil that has rocked Asian markets since the middle of 1997, and that is now having such deep effects on the economies in the region, is the third major currency crisis of the 1990s. This study explains how the Asian crisis arose and spread. It then outlines the corrective policy measures that could help end the crisis, and the shortcomings that have been revealed in the international financial system that require reform to reduce the chances of a recurrence.

This paper analyzes the origins, implications, and solutions for the Asian financial crisis. From the perspective of a member of the Executive Board of the IMF, as Asian problems were building, the IMF overlooked weaknesses in bank and corporate balance sheets in much of Asia: the IMF was unaware of the extraordinary leverage of Korean companies, which in some cases reached a ratio of 600/1 debt to equity. The IMF did not focus on the weak accounting and disclosure practices of banks and nonbanks or generous rollovers of banks to their key clients.

This paper provides an asymmetric information analysis of the recent East Asian crisis. It then outlines several lessons from this crisis. First, there is a strong rationale for an international lender of last resort. Second, without appropriate conditionality for this lending, the moral hazard created by operation of an international lender of last resort can promote financial instability. Third, although capital flows did contribute to the crisis, they are a symptom rather than an underlying cause of the crisis, suggesting exchange controls are unlikely to be a useful strategy to avoid future crises. Fourth, pegged exchange-rate regimes are a dangerous strategy for emerging market countries and make financial crises more likely.

This is a unique insider account of the new world of unfettered finance. The author, an Asian regulator, examines how old mindsets, market fundamentalism, loose monetary policy, carry trade, lax supervision, greed, cronyism, and financial engineering caused both the Asian crisis of the late 1990s and the global crisis of 2008–9. This book shows how the Japanese zero interest rate policy to fight deflation helped create the carry trade that generated bubbles in Asia whose effects brought Asian economies down. The study's main purpose is to demonstrate that global finance is so interlinked and interactive that our current tools and institutional structure to deal with critical episodes are completely outdated. The book explains how current financial policies and regulation failed to deal with a global bubble and makes recommendations on what must change.

An examination of the political and economic causes and consequences of the Asian financial crises.

This book takes stock of and analyzes the events during the Asian financial crisis (AFC) and subsequent developments, including the global financial crisis (GFC), that led to the development of the ASEAN+3 regional financial cooperation framework and the establishment of the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office. The book is the first of its kind to compile comprehensive recollections of the major players during the AFC and the GFC, including country-level narratives on the causes and developments of the crises, and measures to overcome them. The book not only presents an analytical and deeper examination of country experiences during both crises, but also assesses the two crises and covers the lessons learnt from the crises, particularly with a focus on the development of regional financial cooperation. The book concludes with regional financial cooperation in retrospect, aiming to catalyze further discussions on the direction of the region's financial cooperation.

Four years have passed since the onset of the 2008 global crisis, and although some believe that there may be a second down draft soon, attention has shifted from crisis narration to assessing lessons essential for preventing or managing recurrences. The exercise is worthy, but there is always the danger of preparing for the last war when the next attack takes another form. Prevention and Crisis Management addresses this problem by highlighting the future threat to Asia from a broader perspective that takes account of the Japanese and Asian financial crises during the 1990s as well as the global crisis of 2008. The enlarged framework turns out to be illuminating for two distinct reasons. First, it reveals that Asian crises take many diverse forms, and second, the solutions devised to date have only been locally and not universally effective. Policymakers are accordingly advised to always plan for the element of surprise.