The recent Asian financial crisis has rekindled considerable interest in issues related to international reserves. Although numerous studies have attempted to unravel the fundamental rationale for the reserve hoarding behavior – ranging from the transaction demand, precautionary motives, collateral asset argument, and mercantilist behavior, the debate on the determinants of international reserves is far from settled. The difficulty of explicating the reserve holding behavior is consistent with the anecdotal view that the role and functionality of international reserves has evolved along with developments in the global financial markets. Recent financial globalization and tremendous advancement in international capital markets has made reserve holding behavior increasingly susceptible to capital account transactions while recent financial crises have also increased the importance of the role of expectations, policy credibility, and institutional structures.
Each wave of balance of payments crises in the last four decades has brought new insights on the causes and consequences of crises. The recent Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 has revealed several new features that are unseen in the previous crises. The so-called “Third Generation” crisis models have highlighted balance sheet factors and the role of financial sector weaknesses as new determinants of currency crises, that were not explicitly incorporated in the previous two generations of crisis models.
The data presented here in the form of narrative analysis (NA) and interpretation of the life story interviews conducted is the result of the research project entitled: British versus Polish Relationship Talk: Comparative Life Stories of Two Married Males in Their Thirties. My choice to study masculinity and intimacy on the example of two males from Poland and Britain stemmed from relative neglect within the research literature of men in relation to intimacy and also from my lived familiarity in Poland and Britain.
Undesirable sound generation in the combustion chamber of segmented solid propellant rocket motors has been attributed to vortex shedding from obstructions that are uncovered as the propellant burns back. This phenomenon has been investigated experimentally and the mechanism explained.
