The rapid move toward international prudential standards by the end of 2000
has led to a severe malfunctioning of the financial sector. With the large depreciation of the
Baht and the ensuing economic recession, the financial and business sectors were moving
toward insolvency. When the Baht was floated, the private sector had about US$ 75.6 billion
in foreign debts. From mid-1997 to January 1998, the Baht had weakened from 25.8 Baht per
US$ to about 54.1 Baht per US$. Thus, their debt in Baht terms had increased by about 2.14
trillion Baht or about 44% of GDP. In this situation, there is little chance for those businesses
with large amount of foreign debts to remain solvent. Non-performing loans (NPL) in the
system were increasing rapidly (table 6). Financial institutions were hard pressed to provide
adequate provisioning for NPL, particularly with the increased prudential standards. Banks
and finance companies hardly extended new lending to companies in the real sector - afraid
that this will lead to new NPL and hence the need for more provisioning - and tried to keep
their assets as liquid as possible. In the first half of 1998, the stronger banks made money by
lending in the repurchase market (RP) to the Financial Institution Development Fund (FIDF)
which needed to borrow to finance its huge bail-out of the weaker financial institutions. FIDF
borrowings became larger and larger (reaching over 700 billion Baht in May 1998), the
interest rate in the RP market was over 20 percent per annum in the first quarter of 1998, and
there was real danger that the whole financial system would cease to function. The situation
began to improve once the government passed new laws in May 1998 to enable it to issue
government bonds up to Baht 500 billion to pay for the debt of the FIDF, and thereby reduce
the demand in the RP market. Interest rates began to fall from about July 1998 (table 5),
although it can be seen that prime rates have not been falling as rapidly as the short-term
interest rates. The outcome for the real sector has been a severe shortage of liquidity. The
economy got into a vicious downward spiral, with economic recession leading to more NPL,