Before the crisis, the domestic bond markets in Thailand (and most of the emerging economics in the region) were very thin or almost non-existent. The Thai government ran a budget surplus for nine consecutive years before the crisis, so the supply of government bonds to provide liquidity and benchmarks to the market was not available. However, the situation is now very different. After the crisis, the government had to incur large clean up costs. The domestic bond market is now much beeper and more liquid than before (Table 4)