Capital flows into developing economies, he says, follow a 15-year pattern: "seven fat years followed by seven lean years." The year between the two phases is when the flow of money suddenly stops.

"After 15 years have gone by, there is somebody new on the trading desk who did not personally live through the last crash," Frankel said at a globalisation forum, organised by the International Monetary Fund in Washington. "They sort of know about it, but it is easier for them to say the world has changed than if they lost money in it."

There have been two such cycles in the recent past, according to Frankel. The first wave began around 1975, following a sharp increase in oil prices in 1973-74 .

After seven years of frenzied recycling of petrodollars into emerging- market securities, Mexico blew up in 1982. Then there were seven slow years, before investors came back to these markets with renewed vigour in the early 1990s.

That boom, which again went on for seven years, ended with the Asian crisis in 1997. By this logic, the next blow to emerging-market economies will come in 2011 or 2012. So all those who envision that the current subprime mortgage crisis in the US will lead to investors bailing out of risky, emerging-market securities may be disappointed.

The time isn't ripe, yet, for a disaster. "It is too soon, memories are still fresh," Frankel said. "Argentina and Turkey, they were not that long ago, so I think it is too soon." Could the next meltdown start in Asia? The region has a seemingly inexhaustible war chest of $2.5 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves. Besides, most Asian current accounts are now in surplus. East Asia is no longer financing its economic expansion with capital borrowed from overseas. Now it is exporting capital - the region's cumulative current-account surplus was 7% of gross domestic product last year - to the rest of the world.

All of this makes a currency crisis highly unlikely. However, other risks remain. Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics in New York, is predicting "a new and different type of financial crisis in Asia," one that's triggered by excessive liquidity and asset bubbles. The risks stem from Asia's currency policies.

China remains reluctant to allow the yuan to trade more freely. That means other Asian nations won't be able to tolerate significant currency appreciation without their exports losing market share to cheap Chinese-made goods in Western markets. The bloated and growing Asian foreignexchange reserves are being increasingly financed by an expansion in the monetary base. Base-money growth in China was 21% in 2006, double the annual average of 2004 and 2005. It was about 20% in Korea in 2006, six times the average in the preceding two years, according to a World Bank report.