More importantly, unlike Latin America, the borrowing in East Asia was done not by governments but by companies, to whom foreign banks should have applied the traditional risk-reward analysis they would apply to any company. Insofar as foreign banks poured billions of dollars into speculative overinvestment in the region, the Asia crisis looks like a classic example of the kind of speculative boom-bust cycle that has been characteristic of capitalism for at least three centuries. The region's high growth rates encouraged investors to believe that the spiral would continue ever upward, until investors suddenly decided that the spiral could only go downward, which of course made the spiral go downward at an ever faster rate.