Currency Crises

There is no universally accepted definition of a currency crisis, but most would agree that they all involve one key element: investors fleeing a currency en masse out of fear that it might be devalued, in turn fueling the very devaluation they anticipated. Although such crises—the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the speculations on European currencies in the early 1990s, and the ensuing Mexican, South American, and Asian crises—have played a central role in world affairs and continue to occur at an alarming rate, many questions about their causes and effects remain to be answered.…