The size of  1  BIS Review 56/1999  the crisis became evident only when the normal buffers that any economy builds up to absorb shocks were, in the case of the East Asian economies, so readily breached under pressure. It has taken the longstanding participants in the international financial community many decades to build sophisticated financial and legal infrastructures that buffer shocks.
Those infrastructures discourage speculative attacks against a well entrenched currency because financial systems are robust and are able to withstand the consequences of vigorous policy responses to such attacks. For the newer participants in global finance, their institutions, until recently, had not been tested against the rigors of major league pitching, to use a baseball analogy.