The recent Asian currency crisis was caused by large prospective fiscal deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. Absent the political will to raise taxes or cut spending, governments must resort to seignorage revenues to pay for the bailout of the banking system. In a world of forward-looking agents, this makes a currency crisis inevitable.
The recent Asian currency crisis was caused by large prospective fiscal deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. Absent the political will to raise taxes or cut spending, governments must resort to seignorage revenues to pay for the bailout of the banking system. In a world of forward-looking agents, this makes a currency crisis inevitable. Burnside, Eichenbaum, and Rebelo argue that the recent Asian currency crisis was caused by large prospective fiscal deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. They articulate this view using a simple dynamic general equilibrium model, whose key feature is that a speculative attack is inevitable once the present value of future government deficits rises.This is true regardless of the government's foreign reserves position or the initial level of its debt. The government cannot prevent a speculative attack but it can affect its timing. The longer the delay, the higher inflation will be under flexible exchange rates.
What started in the summer of 1997 as a regional economic and financial crisis in East and Southeast Asia had developed into a global financial crisis within the span of a year. This crisis followed the crisis in the European Monetary System in 1992-3 and the Mexican peso crisis in 1994-5. However, unlike the previous two crises, the scale and depth of the Asian crisis surprised everyone. One obvious reason for this is East and Southeast Asia'strack record of economic success. Since the 1960s, no other group of countries in the world has produced more rapid economic growth or such a dramatic reduction in poverty. Given so many years of sustained economic performance the obvious question is: how could events in Asia unfold as they did?
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.
This book is a fascinating account of the financial disaster which overtook Southeast Asia in 1997. The author explains the causes, events, reactions, and effects of the Asian currency crisis. Starting with the crash of the Thai baht, Professor Tan traces the chain of events and details the economic, social and political consequences in the countries involved, plus the responses of the major economic institutions like the World Bank and IMF are described. He also includes a chapter on the Asian economic miracle in the years before the crash, and asks whether that sort of growth is sustainable anyway. The final chapters deal with the lessons to be learned and the possible paths to recovery. This book is essential reading for anyone in the fields of finance, economics, or politics, but it is also interesting and accessible to the lay reader with an interest in world economies.
The book deals with the 1997 Asian currency crisis and analyses the causes and consequences of the crisis. The two hypotheses, fundamental and panic/herd behaviour hypotheses, which are often viewed as competing, are also examined. The first hypothesis states that fundamental imbalances triggered the Asian currency and financial crisis in 1997. The crisis occurred because the economies had deteriorating current accounts, a slow down in growth rates and short-term debt approaching a dangerous level; while the second hypothesis states that sudden shifts in market expectations and confidence were the cause of the initial financial turmoil. When the crisis erupted, it caused panic among domestic and foreign investors. The main focus of this book is to evaluate these two approaches and to examine whether there was evidence of insolvency prior to the crisis in four Asian countries namely Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. A solvency index, originally popularised by Cohen, is calculated for each country. An analysis of the trade sector is undertaken in which the dynamic OLS is employed. Subsequently, the price elasticities obtained from the export demand model together with the GDP supply elasticity are used to calculate the index. From the analysis, it appears that all countries were solvent prior to the crisis where the percentage of actual debt service paid (in 1997) was greater than the percentage that must be paid to be solvent. This suggests that further external credit could have solved the problem, as it was a matter of short-term liquidity difficulties and panic, rather than insolvency.
In August 1998, the Asian currency crisis that had started in mid-1997 metastasized into a global financial crisis with the devaluation of the rouble and a declaration of a Russian Government default on its internal debt. Is this the first wave of such crises the world will see in the future? One common feature among the countries that have fallen victim to the crisis is that they were all "darlings of international finance". Before the financial crisis of 1997, international investors poured money into the stock markets of the East Asian economies, Latin America, Russia, and Eastern Europe. That the crisis afflicted the very countries that depended most heavily on the international economy for their economic growth suggests the importance of the international dimension -- this is the focus of this book. Even though, from the outside, the currency collapses looked similar, the analysis also identifies the important differences in domestic causes as it spread through the different economies.
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.
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.
