You know how it is with buses? You wait ages for one, far longer than seems reasonable — and then three arrive all at once. Financial crises are a bit like that too.
The financial crisis everybody in the business has really been waiting for is a "hard landing" of the Chinese economy, now one of the two motors of the global economy. (The other is still the United States.) Everybody thought it was bound to come eventually — well, everybody who was not too heavily invested in the Chinese market — and it now appears to be here, although the Chinese government is still denying it.
The second crisis, less widely anticipated, is a credit crunch that is sabotaging economic growth in almost all the developing countries except India. In many cases their currencies have fallen to historic lows against the dollar, making it harder for them to repay the dollars they borrowed. Moreover, it's getting harder for them to earn dollars from their exports because commodity prices have collapsed.
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