Abstract
It was nearly a decade ago that is probably sometime in July 1997, that the financial markets found themselves in a mess. It was understood that the consequence was the aftermath of two major crises. The baht (Thai currency) collapsed, and in its wake, the Indonesian rupiah, the Malaysian ringitt and the Philippine peso fell. The Asian economic turmoil afterwards spread across Russia and Latin America in less than a year. Those Asian and Latin American crises, as well as the sub prime crisis in the US, have shown that regional crisis can have tremendous consequences, at a global scale. This is mainly because of the growing interdependence, interpenetration of the financial markets. In other words, the whole financial structure can be shaken by a local or a domestic crisis. We can legitimately ask ourselves how a regional crisis can prevailingly affect the rest of the world. Are these factors responsible for the Asian crisis or at least for its expansion or still better its diversification? Were the crises properly managed by the public actors and the international community at large? How could the crisis have been contained? And finally, to what extent can the lessons of those crises lead our action towards the current crisis? These buzzing questions and many more thoughts will be answered and highlighted in this report.
