Asian financial crisis

The crisis began on July 2, 1997, when Thailand was forced to float and devalue the baht after speculative pressure exhausted its foreign reserves defending a dollar peg. Contagion spread within weeks to Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines as investors pulled capital from economies that had borrowed heavily in short-term dollar debt to fund rapid growth. The IMF assembled rescue packages exceeding $100 billion combined, conditioned on high interest rates, fiscal austerity, and bank and corporate restructuring that many economists later argued deepened the downturn unnecessarily. South Korea's won, Indonesia's rupiah, and Thailand's baht all lost more than half their value at the worst point, and the crisis toppled Indonesia's Suharto government in 1998 after three decades in power.