Contagious speculative attacks

During the European exchange market turmoil in 1992–1993 it was evident that speculative attacks tended to spread across currencies. Using a two-country version of the model developed by Flood and Garber (1984) we show how a speculative attack against one currency may accelerate the ‘warranted’ collapse of a second parity. More importantly, even if the parity of the second currency is viable in the absence of a collapse of the first one, it might be subjected to a speculative attack if the reserves available to defend the parity are ‘small’