Financial Crises in the 1890s and the 1990s: Must History Repeat?

J. Bradford DeLong

J. Bradford DeLong Professor of Economics and Blum Center Chief Economist - University of California, Berkeley

Discussants: Benjamin M. Friedman and

BMF

Benjamin M. Friedman Harvard University

Richard N. Cooper

RNC

Richard N. Cooper

THE 1990S HAVE seen three large international financial crises shake the
world economy: the collapse of western Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism
(ERM) in the fall of 1992, the collapse of the Mexican peso in the
winter of 1994–95, and the East Asian financial crisis of 1997–98. Other
crises late in the decade, in Brazil and Russia, did not develop the scope
or reach of these three, even though observers and central bankers at the
time feared that their consequences could become even worse.