At 4:39 am +0800 11/10/97, Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> by those new creditors of the world economy, Japan Inc. and the European
> Union. The IMF bailout of Thailand may be a sign that this is already
> happening: a lot of the cash was put up by the Japanese, who also have the
> biggest corporate investments and FDI in Thailand. The second-biggest
> donor was, I believe, the Chinese/Hong Kong bloc. Might this be a
> sizeable quid for a future Nippokeynesian pro quo?
But note that this was organized under the auspices of the IMF. Further, when
an Asian bail-out fund, ostensibly independent of the IMF, was proposed by the
Japanese, it was quickly shot down.
Recall too that the World Bank book on the East Asian Economic Miracle was
funded by the Japanese, but ultimately subject to spin-doctoring within the
World Bank -- see Robert Wade's piece in the NLR on this.
In brief, hegemonies are not so easily shifted, and not especially when it
appears the Japanese remain relatively content to let things be more or less as
they now stand. Which may or may not back up Adam Webb's arguments....
Incidentally, isn't it curious how Hegel's owl of minerva takes wing again --
bookstores in SE Asia are full of books by management gurus and others
celebrating the 'miracle', books penned and put into press perhaps six months
or a year ago, now ironically appearing on the shelves in a sort of mocking of
reality. This also a virtual repeat of the books on Japan in the early 1990s,
just as the whole shebang was about to implode; and Japan has still to recover
from that...