The onset of the global financial crisis led to a reassessment of the perceived risks associated with different types of funding and has seen banks shift their funding base towards domestic deposits and away from wholesale debt.3 This development does not reflect a lack of appetite for Australian bank paper, as banks’ cost of issuance has generally declined over recent years to be currently not far from pre-crisis spreads.
Median inflation rates for the nine countries, which may be more representative of typical experience, averaged 61 percent per year in the 1980s and 26 percent in the first half of the 1990s. 3  Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, all of which had four-digit inflation rates in both 1989 and 1990, succeeded in reducing inflation to single-digit levels by 1997.