Judging from the manifestations of previous financial crises, financial crises can be divided into four categories: currency crisis, banking crisis, capital market crisis and mixed crisis.
Usually, currency crisis refers to a speculative impact on the purchasing power or exchange value of a currency, which leads to a sharp decline in the value of the currency, and the authorities quickly exhaust foreign exchange reserves in order to maintain the value of the local currency. For example, the European monetary crisis of 1992- 1993 is a typical monetary crisis.
Bank crisis refers to actual or potential bank operation obstacles or default, which causes banks to suspend the internal conversion of their liabilities, depositors lose confidence in banks, which leads to tight capital, and banks eventually go bankrupt or need a lot of government assistance. In the mid-1990s, Japan and various countries in the Southeast Asian crisis experienced a large number of financial institutions' operational difficulties and bankruptcies.
The capital market crisis mainly refers to the stock market crisis, which is characterized by a large number of selling stocks, leading to a sharp decline in the stock index. For example, Japan's economic recession in the 1990s began with the stock crisis.
The actual financial crisis is increasingly manifested as a mixed form of various crises, which is difficult to distinguish strictly and constantly evolves in different types. Typical mixed crises, such as the economic recession in Japan and the financial crisis in Southeast Asia, are intertwined with currency crisis, capital market crisis and banking crisis.
The International Monetary Fund divides the financial crisis into currency crisis, banking crisis, systemic crisis and debt crisis. In fact, the essence of debt crisis is currency crisis. For example, the financial crisis in some Latin American countries in the 1980s and 1990s originated from the currency crisis caused by debt.
2 Typical characteristics before the crisis
An in-depth analysis of the actual situation of economic and financial operations in various countries before and after the crisis and the discovery of some typical characteristics before the previous crises can provide us with important reference.
(a) Sustained high economic growth for many years
Take Southeast Asian countries before the crisis as an example. Before 1997, the national economies of Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines maintained a growth rate of 6%-8%, and the average growth rate of GDP in Thailand was as high as 9.04%.
The same thing happened in Japan. After the first oil crisis, Japan's economy ended the high-speed growth of 10 and turned to low-speed growth. Even so, during the 15 years before the crisis in the 1990s, the average growth rate of Japan's economy remained around 4%. Among them, the real GDP growth rate of 1987- 1990 in Japan was as high as 4.9%, 6.0%, 4.5% and 5. 1%, far exceeding expectations, which was extremely rare in its history.
In Mexico, from the late 1980s to the 1994 crisis, Mexico also experienced a long period of economic prosperity, including sustained high economic growth, steady decline in inflation rate, and disappearance of fiscal deficit.
By studying the situation of these countries, we can find that it is precisely under the attraction of the sustained prosperity of these countries that the following series of phenomena have emerged, which make the fragility of the financial system accumulate and be covered up by the seemingly sustained economic prosperity.
(B) a large inflow of external funds
Sustained high economic growth and corresponding policy factors have attracted a large inflow of external funds. However, external capital is a "double-edged sword". While financing a country's economic development and further promoting its rapid economic growth, it also makes these countries more vulnerable to the impact of reverse capital flow, especially when external capital is mainly short-term debt and hot money with strong liquidity.
Before the crisis, in order to attract foreign investment to promote economic growth and realize the grand plan of building an international financial center, Thailand quickly implemented a series of measures to attract foreign investment and promote financial liberalization, encouraging foreign countries to borrow dollars at low cost, resulting in a large inflow of funds. 1991-196, the average annual capital inflow of major Asian capital-importing countries such as Thailand was 39 billion US dollars, of which196 reached 77 billion US dollars, and197 had another 365,438 billion US dollars in the first half of this year, but by the second half of this year it had become capital.
Before the two crises in 1980s and 1990s, Mexico and other Latin American countries experienced a large inflow of foreign capital. Before the crisis in the 1980s, external capital inflows were mainly loans from foreign banks. The net bank debts of the three Latin American countries increased from $6,543.8+36.5 billion in 0977 to14.6 billion at the end of 0982. Foreign loans have become the main way for these countries to finance their trade deficits. Before the crisis in 1990s, the main way of external capital inflow was the net inflow of private capital. 1993, the net inflow of private capital in Mexico soared from $5.8 billion to $30.2 billion, reaching a total of $72 billion, half of which was in the form of securities investment. In addition, there are $22.2 billion in bank loans and $654.38+062 billion in foreign direct investment.