The Length and Cost of Banking Crises (Electronic book text)

The spread of banking crises globally in recent decades has spurred interest in studying the phenomenon. One of the principal problems of investigating banking crises is identifying when such occurrences happened and how long they lasted. Accurately timing banking crises is obviously important to the financial surveillance responsibilities of the Fund in terms of determining the best policies for preventing their onset and limiting their damage. A banking crisis is not a simple event that takes place at a point in time, like a revaluation of a currency parity under the Bretton Woods system, for example. Rather, it is an episode, spread out diffusely over time, with no clear beginning or end.