Currencies and Crises brings together Paul Krugman's work on international monetary economics from the late 1970s to the present, in an effort to make sense of a turbulent period that, in Krugman's words, "involved one surprise after another, most of them unpleasant." The eleven essays cover such key areas as the role of exchange rates in balance-of-payments adjustment policy, the role of speculation in the functioning of exchange-rate regimes, third world debt, and the construction of an international monetary system.