Whether countries respond to a crisis with policies that attempt to comprehensively address macroeconomic and institutional problems, or with partial and temporizing fixes, or through inaction because the political will and/or the state capacity is lacking, depends more on country circumstances—economic, political, and institutional—and less on the intrinsic severity of the crisis itself. To illustrate these three scenarios, this note examines the onset of crises in seven countries, the adequacy of the response in five, and the toll crises have taken on the two that failed, for largely political reasons, to rebuild institutions and restore a degree of normality.