With aftershocks of the recent global financial earthquake still being felt in some parts of the world, it would be useful to have a set of Early Warning Indicators to tell us what countries are most vulnerable.    Nobody should be surprised that it is hard to forecast crises with high reliability;    low-risk opportunities for profits are never easy to find.   Thus it is especially hard to predict the timing of a crisis.  Some economists, however, are skeptical that Early Warning Indicators (EWIs) have any useful predictive ability at all.  A common assessment is that EWIs have failed, in the sense that in each historical round of emerging market crises (1982, 1994-2001, 2008) those particular variables that appeared statistically significant in that round did not perform well in the subsequent round.   This is not the right conclusion. read more