A final, and humbling lesson from the Asian predicament is that the world simply
still does not understand financial crises very well. The Asian crisis was almost completely
unpredicted, even after all the research and commentary that followed the Mexico/Argentina crisis
of 1994/95. Of course part of the reason is that the crisis probably did not have to happen, if it
had been better managed within the countries and in Washington. Yet, it is fair to say that we do
not fully understand the preconditions for a crisis or the dynamics of capital withdrawals once
they start taking place. The rapid development of new financial instruments, such as hedge funds,
complicate the situation, since there is only a basic understand of the magnitude of and the
systemic risks from these transactions. The best evidence of these dangers comes from the sudden collapse of long-Term Capital Management in the United States. Unfortunately, financial
crises in emerging markets are likely to be a recurring phenomena in coming years, the only
questions being exactly where and when.