Abstract We provide an overview of the important events of the recent global financial crisis and their implications for exchange rates and market dynamics. Our goal is to catalogue all that was truly of major importance in this episode. We also construct a quantitative measure of crises that allows for a comparison of the current crisis to earlier events. In addition, we address whether one could have predicted costly events before they happened in a manner that would have allowed market participants to moderate their risk exposures and yield better returns from currency speculation.