II The outbreak of the crisis in some Asian countries poses some new questions because some of the key fundamentals were quite sound: In many cases the public fiscal balance was in surplus or at least was not in excessive deficit. Unemployment was fairly limited. The monetary policy stance was mostly quite restrained, and inflation remained moderate for a long time.
For quite a while current account deficits were financed by capital imports apparently unproblematically. BIS Review 59/1998  -2-  Some indicators even showed an exceptionally positive trend. In particular, the saving and investment ratios were comparatively high, and real growth in this region was stronger than elsewhere.