Suchergebnisse

This paper presents an analytical framework for understanding the East Asian crises. We argue that vulnerability was created by the boom and bust incurred under pegged exchange rates, and by liberalisation in the presence of a bank-based financial regime with implicit promises of bail-out. These vulnerabilities were interconnected. Negative shocks precipitated both currency devaluation and financial crisis, and the latter created obligations for the government to bail out the financial sector. The critical feature which led to collapse was, we argue, the fact that currency depreciation led to a worsening of the financial crisis, due to massive unhedged borrowing in foreign currency, to which the fixed exchange rate regime had led. Financial collapse resulted when the currency devaluation was sufficiently large that those who had lent to the financial system came to believe that government guarantees could not be honoured. This in turn triggered fears of sovereign insolvency, which turned currency depreciation into currency collapse.

The aims of this paper are, first, to construct a consistent comparative set of data on the sources of finance for investment over the period 1970–94 for the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Japan, and, second, to challenge conventional views of the international differences in financing patterns. We find that there is little evidence to support the view that Germany is a "bank‐financed" system nor that the United Kingdom or the United States are "market financed". Whilst bank finance is more important in Japan, there has been a steady decline in the proportion of investment financed by banks over the last 25 years.