Eastern Europe 2008 = Southeast Asia 1997

PAUL KRUGMAN

Eastern Europe 2008 = Southeast Asia 1997
From Bloomberg:
Foreign-denominated loans helped fuel eastern European economies including Poland, Romania and Ukraine, funding home purchases and entrepreneurship after the region emerged from communism. The elimination of such lending is magnifying the global credit crunch and threatening to stall the expansion of some of Europe’s fastest-growing economies.
The key to the Asian crisis — and of Argentina’s collapse in 2002 — was the way domestic players leveraged themselves up with foreign-currency loans. When the capital inflows dried up, and the Asian currencies plunged, these debts suddenly became a much bigger burden, decimating balance sheets and causing a downward spiral of deleveraging.
Fonte:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/eastern-europe-2008-southeast-asia-1997/