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The year 1997 witnessed a major malaise develop in the regional economy. The last half of 1997 saw one of the worst financial crises in the history of postwar Asian economies. In particular, some outstanding players in the economic growth race in East Asia were badly infected by an economic growth virus. The immediate impact of Asia's financial crisis is more accurately confined to Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand-five East Asian countries hardest hit. The immediate impact of the financial crisis was to put severe downward pressure on currencies of many countries in Southeast Asia. A development that contributed to the surge in capital inflows to the East Asian countries in the early to mid-1990s was the decline in asset yields in industrial countries.