Remember the financial crisis that laid waste to the Mexican economy in 1995? Or Thailand's meltdown in 1997, which soon spread to Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines, Russia and Brazil? Or the implosion of Argentina's economy in 2001, which left millions of people destitute?

Just distant memories, unlikely to recur — or so the world's investors seem to have concluded.

International money managers are pouring money at a record pace into the emerging markets of Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. Cash is gushing into mutual funds that specialize in emerging markets, and billions of dollars more are flowing into such countries from giant insurance companies and pension funds.

Turkey's stock market is up more than 50 percent this year and Mexico's is up more than 30 percent. Egyptian stocks have more than doubled. And investors are snapping up bonds issued by emerging-market governments with remarkable gusto.

Therein lie the makings of future disasters, in the view of many economists, market veterans and policymakers. Having pumped large sums into emerging markets at a time of low interest rates and high prices for the commodities that many developing countries produce, investors may well bolt when conditions deteriorate, with the sudden outflow of cash devastating economies and plunging governments into default.

"I worry that there's this perfect storm coming for emerging markets," said Kristin J. Forbes, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who served until early this year on President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.

Skeptics contend that the main reason for the boom is the paltry level of interest rates in the United States, Europe and Japan, which prompts money managers flush with cash to scour the globe for investments providing at least slightly better returns. "There's just a huge amount of money sloshing around looking for a place to go," said Desmond Lachman, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute who, as a Wall Street research analyst, was one of the first to predict doom for Argentina well before its 2001 default.

The problem, Lachman and others said, is that the influx of cash makes the financial strength of many countries look better than it really is — and deludes government officials into believing that their policies must be near-perfect. "Even Turkeys Fly When the Winds Are Strong" is how Lachman put it in the title of an article he published recently in the magazine International Economy.

Alarming or heartening, the amount of private capital flowing into emerging markets is reaching all-time highs — a total of $345 billion this year, according to a September estimate from the Institute of International Finance, an organization of multinational banks, securities firms and other financial institutions. Drawing ominous parallels to the period leading up to the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, William R. Rhodes, a senior vice chairman of Citigroup, pointed out at the institute's news conference that the previous record of $323 billion was set in 1996.

"You remember what happened after 1996," Rhodes said. "We had 1997. We had 1998. We had the default by Russia, and we had Long-Term Capital Management" — a Connecticut hedge fund whose collapse in 1998 triggered a nosedive in U.S. stock and bond markets.