Strumenti finanziari derivati, movimenti di capitale e crisi valutarie degli anni Novanta: alcuni elementi per farsi un'idea

Derivatives have been the most dynamic component of financial globalization in the Nineties, a period characterized by repeated phenomena of financial instability and crises. This paper underlines a largely neglected aspect of those crises: the fact that massive use of derivative instruments re-shuffles market risks in very opaque ways, so that traditional financial statistics may be of little use in diagnosing the “true” causes of a particular financial crisis. As a consequence, policy prescriptions may be quite inadequate. The paper reviews actors and instruments which contributed to innovative financial behaviours, the issues related to measuring leverage in financial transactions and within institutions; the functioning of highly leveraged institutions. These building blocks allow an assessment of the actual information value of balance of payments statistics, and also an assessment of the role of derivative instruments in speculative attacks, with an example about “exotic” derivatives in the 1994 Mexican crisis.