There is a large body of scholarship in circulation that has examined the causal relationship between economic factors and output growth leading up to the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, many of which proposing speculative attacks on the Thai economy as the primary cause. Yet despite its relevance to the study of the pre-crisis Thai economy, there are currently no studies examining the price movements of non-ferrous metals as indicators leading up to the event. This paper examines and compares the metal markets in the semiconductor-dominant Thai market in the mid-90s as an insight into the predictive value of metal prices over the short-, medium- and long-terms. Our study finds that, when assumptions are held, some non-ferrous metals appear to have great value as short- and long-term recession predictors.

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