Had these elements been present, along with the capital markets they would have supported, the consequences of the initial shocks of early 1997 may well have been quite different. It is noteworthy that the financial systems of most continental European countries escaped much of the turmoil of the past two years.
And looking back over recent decades, we find fewer examples in continental Europe of banking crises sparked by real estate booms and busts or episodes of credit crunch of the sort I have mentioned in the United States and Japan.