Turkey is far from the only country whose economy has grown reliant on foreign lending. Argentina and South Africa are in the same boat. That’s why some think that the problems underway in Turkey could be the start of something bigger.

Indeed, Argentina’s central bank on Monday surprised markets by raising its interest rates by five percentage points. It was an attempt to prop up its currency by encouraging foreign investors to stick around.

How do problems spread?

That is certainly how it’s worked at times in the past. One highly indebted, fast-growing economy starts to unravel, and others tend to follow, as fearful investors rush for the exits. In most cases, those countries’ economies aren’t all that large, but the chain reactions they trigger in the financial markets can have global repercussions.

In 1994, the Mexican government devalued the peso, setting off a period of financial instability that came to be known as the Tequila Crisis. In 1997, the collapse of the Thai baht set off a financial crisis throughout East Asia.

And in 1998, the devaluation of the Russian ruble threatened to spread instability to the heart of the developed world, when it contributed to the collapse of large American hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, sending financial markets in the United States into a panic.

In past crises, one way that trouble spread was through the banking system. Foreign banks lent money to companies, investors and governments in the crisis-stricken countries. As borrowers defaulted, those loans led to deep losses that threatened to undermine the health of financial systems thousands of miles away.

There are echoes of that situation in today’s Turkey crisis. A number of large European banks — including Italy’s UniCredit, Spain’s BBVA and France’s BNP Paribas — own stakes in Turkish lenders. Other western banks are exposed to Turkey via loans to Turkish companies.