The financial sector has since made every effort to design instruments that protect against price fluctuations, to transform private debt into tradable financial securities, and to gain access to speculative markets. But these efforts were conducive to fraud and delinquency, and thus spurred a wave of new financial crises – in Europe in 1992, in Asia in 1997, and in Russia in 1998 – as well as a recession in Europe and the United States in the early 2000’s.