Cross-Border Lending: What's Different this Time

This article is based upon the author's lecture entitled "The Next Wave of Cross-Border Lending" delivered in connection with the Meredith Lectures at McGill University in April 1994.* The subject of that lecture, and of this article, is how cross-border lending to less developed countries (LDCs) in the 1990s differs from the last major period of such lending in the late 1970s. It is surely a testament to the accelerated obsolescence of modem financial commentary that the author's April 1994 lecture - delivered in the middle of a boom in cross-border lending - has already been followed by a bust starting in late December 1994 when Mexico devalued its currency, and by tentative signs of yet another resurgence in cross-border capital flows in the second half of 1995