Avoiding a Crisis

Abstract

During the years 1720 to 1987 there were 36 financial crises in the Western World (Lybeck, 1992). That makes a crisis every 7–8 years on average. However, such events appear to have become more common wherever one looks. Over the 15 years from 1987 until 2002 it looks as if the intervals have been shorter: at the beginning of the 1990s there were crises in three Nordic countries, France, UK, Japan and the United States. In the last years of the century we experienced events in Asia, Russia and Latin America. Japan and some countries in Latin America are still suffering from heavy losses in their banking systems.