Mexican Economic Crisis

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After nearly a decade of stagnant economic activity and high inflation in Mexico, the Mexican government liberalized the trade sector in 1985, adopted an economic stabilization plan at the end of 1987, and gradually introduced market-oriented institutions. Those reforms led to the resumption of economic growth, which averaged 3.1 percent per year between 1989 and 1994. In 1993 inflation was brought down to single-digit levels for the first time in more than two decades. As its economic reforms advanced, Mexico began to attract more foreign investment, a development helped by the absence of major restrictions on capital inflows, especially in the context of low U.S. interest rates. Indeed, large capital inflows began in 1990, when a successful foreign- debt renegotiation was formalized. The devaluation of the peso in December 1994 put an abrupt end to these capital inflows and precipitated the financial crisis.

Regulatory Failures, Credit Growth, and the Onset of the Crisis

The financial sector also underwent a substantial liberalization, which, when combined with other factors, encouraged an increase in the supply of credit of such magnitude and speed that it overwhelmed weak supervisors, the scant capital of some banks, and even borrowers.[1]

Several factors contributed to facilitate the abundance of credit: (1) improved economic expectations; (2) a substantial reduction in the public debt;[2] (3) a phenomenal international availability of securitized debt (see Hale 1995);(4) a boom in real estate and in the stock market; and (5) a strong private-investment response.

Poor borrower screening, credit-volume excesses, and the slowdown of economic growth in 1993 turned the debt of many into an excessive burden. Nonperforming loan...

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... al. (1996: 77-8) show, fast credit growth and its aftermath is not an exclusive feature of Mexico's crisis: ``Kaminsky and Reinhart (1996) reviewed the experiences of 20 countries that experienced banking and balance-of-payments crises and found that in about half, the banking crisis preceded the balance-of-payments crisis. The causal pattern reversed in only a few instances. Thus, there is support for the notion that bank soundness exerts negative effects on the external balance and the exchange rate.'' Also, ``All the sampled countries except Venezuela experienced a sharp expansion of credit to the private sector prior to the crisis'' (Lindgren et al. 1996: 84). The experiences of the Czech Republic, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, and others in 1997 should be added to the list above, as well as the similar episodes of Sweden and other developed countries in 1992.

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