The crash of ‘97 taught us we won’t see the next one coming‘We have had two ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ crises in the past two decades, and a third in the next couple of years cannot be ruled out’
This is the 20th anniversary tomorrow of the Tom Yum Goong crisis in Thailand, which triggered the Asian financial crisis that wrought havoc across our economies for an awful 18 months and whose scars still smart today.
The International Monetary Fund had negotiated bailouts ranging from US$57 billion for South Korea and US$40 billion for Indonesia and Brazil to more modest billions in Thailand, Russia and Malaysia.
Currencies across the region had crashed – the Indonesian rupiah to about one-fifth of its pre-crisis level. Stock markets had been shredded.
HK property values crash to 30 per cent of 1997 values.
The sobering lesson was that Hong Kong, with no local market of consequence, was an economy that depended on flows – and when the flows dried up as the crisis deepened, so Hong Kong rapidly joined the wounded.
Our economy contracted 5.5 per cent in 1998, and we plunged into six successive years of deflation – only to have the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic knock us firmly backwards again in 2003, and the global recession to cut our knees off in 2008.
Source: SCMP
http://www.scmp.com/business/global-eco ... one-coming
It's all about "how much you made when you were right" & "how little you lost when you were wrong"