Wall Street and the Mexican Crisis: A Temporal Analysis of Emerging Markets

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the Mexican episode provides an excellent laboratory for exposing the interactions between political and economic time-scales. The events in Mexico invite us to take a closer look at what has become a crucial factor in world affairs, namely the mechanisms driving the financial markets and their interactions with the international system. The latter, led by the United States, was forced to adjust its own reaction time to that of the financial markets in record time. States which had long been the unquestioned masters of time are now confronted with a driving force whose scope and paroxysms are among the major challenges as the twentieth century draws to a close.

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