FINANCIAL FRAGILITY AND FINANCIAL CRISIS IN MEXICO

ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to show how Mexico’s strategy of financial deregulation and liberalization set the stage for the crisis that the country suffered in December 1994. The theoretical underpinning is Post‐Keynesian, and more precisely, a Minsky‐inspired analytical perspective extended to the open economy. In the first section the authors carry out a theoretical discussion dealing with some Post‐Keynesian theories of the business cycle. A second section is devoted to examining and identifying the stylized facts in the evolution of the Mexican economy, with special emphasis on the interaction between the financial and real variables. In the last section the authors propose a simplified model which shows how and why a strategy of financial deregulation and liberalization may lead to financial fragility and to a crisis.