ABSTRACT
On August 17, 1998, Russia’s exchange and financial markets collapsed. In a few days, the ruble dropped to one-third of its value, the federal government was in default on its debt, and the stock market fell into a deep freeze. It took a few more days for the crisis to migrate to far-flung emerging markets: Central and Eastern Europe, but also South America cringed, and if South Asia could have fallen any further after its own crisis a year before, it would have.
