This July marks the tenth anniversary of East Asia’s financial crisis. In July 1997, the Thai Baht plummeted. Soon after, financial panic spread to Indonesia and Korea, then to Malaysia. In a little more than a year, the Asian financial crisis became a global financial crisis, with the crash of Russia’s ruble and Brazil’s real.

In the midst of a crisis, no one knows how far an economy will drop or for how long. But capitalism, since its beginning, has been marked by crises; each time, the economy recovers, bu