One of the notable manifestations of this was the Bangkok International Banking Facility, whereby small Thai businesses were presented with a frictionless conduit to international financial markets, where they could borrow at attractively low interest rates, in foreign currency.
In Australia, we know, from our small taste of the Swiss loans in the 1980s, how dangerous it is to have relatively unsophisticated borrowers given the opportunity and incentives to take on sophisticated products involving foreign exchange risk. But in Australia this was relatively modest in macro-economic terms.