After more than a decade of maintaining the Thai baht’s peg to the U.S. dollar, Thai
authorities abandoned the peg in July 1997.6 By October, market forces had led the
baht to depreciate by 60 percent against the dollar. The depreciation triggered a
wave of speculation against other Southeast Asian currencies. Over the same period,
the Indonesian rupiah, Malaysia ringgit, Philippine peso, and South Korean won
abandoned links to the dollar and depreciated 47, 35, 34, and 16 percent, respectively.
This episode reopened one of the oldest debates in economics: whether a currency
should have a fixed or floating exchange rate. Consider the case of Thailand.
Although Thailand was widely regarded as one of Southeast Asia’s outstanding
performers throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it relied heavily on inflows of shortterm
foreign capital, attracted both by the stable baht and by Thai interest rates,
which were much higher than comparable interest rates elsewhere. The capital
inflow supported a broad-based economic boom that was especially visible in the
real estate market.
However, by 1996, Thailand’s economic boom had fizzled. As a result, both local
and foreign investors grew nervous and began withdrawing funds from Thailand’s
financial system, which put downward pressure on the baht. However, the Thai government
resisted the depreciation pressure by purchasing baht with dollars in the
foreign-exchange market and also raising interest rates, which increased the attractiveness
of the baht. But the purchases of the baht greatly depleted Thailand’s
reserves of hard currency. Moreover, raising interest rates adversely affected an
already weak financial sector by dampening economic activity. These factors ultimately
contributed to the abandonment of the baht’s link to the dollar.