When Thailand floated the Baht and asked for IMF assistance, the country was basically bankrupt. Even though it was not publicly known at the time, the Bank of Thailand had made huge amounts of forward commitments to sell foreign currency in order to defend the Baht against speculators. net official foreign reserves had fallen to only US$ 2.9 billion At that time, the country had about US$ 36.5 billion in short-term foreign debt, and the current account deficit was running at about one billion US$ per month.