Financial Crises of the Future

• Author: Paolo Mauro/Yishay Yafeh
• Position: Division Chief in the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department/Visiting Scholar in the IMF's Research Department from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Center for Economic Policy Research
• Pages: 26-30

Page 26

Will they resemble the contagious crises of the 1990s or the countryspecific crises of the 1890s?

The damaging financial crises of the 1990s-originating in Mexico in 1994, Asia in 1997, and Russia in 1998-spread quickly across emerging markets, prompting calls for reform of the financial architecture. That was a decade ago, however. The only major, full-blown emerging market crisis of this century-in Argentina in 2001-led to little spillover, or "contagion," except in neighboring Uruguay. In recent years, commentary in the financial press and in publications by investment banks and rating agencies has often emphasized an apparent decline in international contagion risk.

That is not to say that investors are not occasionally reminded of the issue of contagion: recent episodes of financial market turbulence include the drop in equity prices in emerging markets in May-June 2006, the global equity sell-off that began with an unwinding of positions on the Chinese stock market in February-March 2007, and the most recent woes that began in mid-2007, triggered by developments in the subprime mortgage markets in the United States.

On the whole, however, over the past few years emerging markets have enjoyed abundant liquidity, low bond spreads, and surges in capital inflows. Moreover, a very long-term perspective suggests that the contagious crises of the 1990s were not the norm but an unusual phenomenon. During the last period of financial globalization-the half centuryPage 27 prior to World War I-the world witnessed several crises, but essentially no contagion. even the most famous financial collapse of the period, the Barings crisis that originated in Argentina in 1890, did not have much impact outside the borders of that nation.

Will future crises look more like those of the 1990s or of the 1890s? Was the Argentine crisis of 2001 a harbinger of a return to self-contained crises? And if international spillovers remain possible, are there implications for global governance in the area of financial markets? To shed light on these questions, it is useful to analyze the historical record.

A tale of two eras

The 1870-1913 period of financial globalization- characterized by free trade, nearly unrestricted migration, large international capital flows, and sophisticated financial markets-resembles, and in some respects surpasses, globalization as we know it today. The London market for bonds issued by the "emerging economies" of the day was large (with an overall capitalization amounting to more than half of Britain's GDP), liquid (with bond spreads fluctuating considerably and reported daily in the newspapers), and supported by timely and reliable information (with political and economic news about emerging economies widely available in the British press). The typical portfolio of a British investor around the turn of the 20th century was probably more internationally diversified, and included a far larger share of emerging market securities, than that of his great-grandchild living at the beginning of the 21st century.

This global integration came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War I and the subsequent upheaval of the Great Depression and World War II. International financial flows resumed in the 1970s, but only in the final years of the 20th century did financial globalization achieve a level and a form reminiscent of the pre-1914 period. In particular, reliance on tradable emerging market bonds was jump-started by the Brady deals of the early 1990s, which repackaged the defaulted bank debt of the 1970s and early 1980s into bonds.

Despite these similarities in scale and reliance on bond finance, a striking difference between the 1870-1913 era and the 1990s relates to the extent that asset prices-specifically, sovereign bond spreads-moved together. Sovereign bond spreads are defined, for the historical period, as the yields on emerging market countries' bonds issued in pounds sterling on the London Stock exchange, minus yields on British consols; and, for the modern period, as the yields on emerging market countries' bonds issued in U.S. dollars, minus yields on long-term U.S. treasury bonds. Whereas bond spreads followed...