Before the crisis, the baht was fixed to a basket of currencies with the US dollar having by far the largest weight in the basket resulting in a fairly stable baht/$US rate for many years before the crisis. However, Thailand also tried to pursue an independent interest rate policy. This can be seen from the gap between the Thai overnight interbank rate and the US overnight fed fund rate. This gap averaged about 3.97% between January 1989 and June 1997 (the last month before the float of the baht), and sometimes reached up to 10% (see Figure 1). With liberalized capital flow, this inevitably led to a large amount of capital flow into Thailand.