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The authors' earlier work on financial crises suggested that economies behave differently on the eve of crises (see Kaminsky and Reinhart, 1996). Typically, financial crises occur as an economy enters a recession that follows a prolonged boom in economic activity fueled by credit creation and surges in capital inflows. The cycle of overlending is exacerbated by implicit or explicit deposit guarantees, poor supervision, and moral-hazard problems in the banking sector. Crises are accompanied by an overvaluation of the currency, weakening exports, and the bursting of asset price bubbles. In this paper, the authors extend that work by analyzing the extent to which past crises share common characteristics in Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. In addition, the authors examine the recent crises in Asia and in Latin America to determine whether the considerable regional differences that they find for the earlier sample have eroded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]