The calm before the storm? That question dominated the stage at the seventh annual conference on emerging markets finance, cosponsored by the World Bank and the Brookings Institution and held at Brookings in late April 2005. At the time of the conference, it had been a little less than eight years since the onset of the Asian financial crisis, an event that had depression-like effects throughout much of Asia and, for a time, seemed to threaten global economic stability.