One can readily understand that the purchase of unhedged short-term dollar liabilities to be invested in Thai baht domestic loans (counting on the dollar exchange rate to hold) would at some point trigger a halt in lending by Thailand’s banks. But why did the economy need to collapse with it?
Such a long time range is important, as many of the movements in wealth inequality are very gradual, which means that these changes can only be estimated reliably once enough data are available. At the same time, retrieving historical information on wealth poses multiple challenges. First, data on household wealth are much scarcer than, say, data on household income.