The Financial Sector in Macroeconomic Adjustment Programmes

Abstract

Interest in the macroeconomics of financial sector problems has greatly increased since the Mexican and Asian crises in the second half of the 1990s. While there were certainly financial and banking crises reaching macroeconomic proportions before these episodes – for example, in the Nordic countries in the early 1990s – it is fair to say that these were generally not seen as a genuine complicating or contributing factor to macroeconomic imbalances. This state of affairs, however, has changed drastically since, even to the point that accepted journalistic wisdom mentions the importance of the financial sector in – depending on which newspaper or magazine one happens to read – emphasizing, accelerating, or even triggering macroeconomic problems.