an important lesson from the crisis is the importance of having appropriate and timely data. before the crisis, the availability of data that are essential for risk assessments and economic management was woefully inadequate. GDP data were only available on an annual basis and with a time lag of a year or so. regularly available quarterly data or monthly data were extremely limited. and critically important data on short-term foreign debt were hardly available at all. in fact at that time adequacy of foreign reserves was still being viewed simply by foreign currency requirements on the trade side (e.g. the number of months of imports).