Don’t let Boston and Brooklyn turn into Bangkok.

Last month on a trip through Bangkok, my girlfriend and I decided to take advantage of the exchange rate and stay in a luxury hotel near the heart of the city. But even at 35 baht to the dollar, the legendary Author’s Wing—one-time lodgings of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham—of the Mandarin Oriental remained out of our budget. So we chose a hotel in the golden-domed State Tower a few blocks away. The 68-story building is a white monolith of columned balconies and baroque curves. But we chose it for the amenities, especially our private 53^rd-floor balcony, not for its looks.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the glass doors, high into the polluted Bangkok air, and saw a decrepit, blackened shell of a building with balconies exactly like the one on which I was standing. Startled, I took in the rest of the panorama. All over the skyline, towers stood in various states of undress but sans cranes or construction site bustle. My guidebook was silent about them, but I soon learned the towers had died, and I was staring at ghosts.

How did this happen? In 1997 the Asian financial crisis erupted in Thailand due to, economists say, an imbalance of foreign investment. A bubble grew, in that the very money foreign investors were pumping into Thailand was propping up the stellar GDP growth that made the country an attractive investment. When the global economic climate changed and investment dollars shifted elsewhere, Thai asset prices collapsed, causing a credit crunch that spread throughout Southeast Asia. Banks had been lending out money based on ever-rising, unsustainable asset values and promising returns far in excess of what could ever be delivered. Any of this starting to sound familiar?