The extreme negative correlations during the crisis years reflect an escalation of a deeper regional foreign exchange risk exposure toward Asian firms. Our results reflected in Figure 2 are supported by foreign exchange rate exposure studies of Muller and Verschoor (2007) and Lin (2011). If we compare the correlation coefficients between the two crises, the length of the downward trend of negative correlations in the GFC are longer than in the Asian crisis. All countries experience more sudden declining jumps in correlations during the Asian crisis compared to the GFC. This implies that the spillovers from the recession and financial turmoil in the United States and Europe are too strong to be avoided by all Asian countries, despite the fact that the region was more resilient during the GFC compared to the Asian crisis. The pattern of the conditional correlations presented in Figure 2 reflects a reaction of the stock markets and the foreign exchange markets to changes in the underlying conditions in the markets caused by shocks and policy changes. We address this issue in detail next by focusing on the Asian crisis and the GFC since the two crises have worldwide spillovers. Later, we exam the implications of changing correlations among financial asset returns for international portfolio selection.