On Mon, 1 Jun 1998, Richard K. Moore wrote:
> 4) SE-Asian currency crisis. Again an Asian power-nexus developed
> in Asia, this time the `tiger economies' of SE Asia. And again
> this uprising was squelched by Western agency, this time by
> pulling out investments precipitously and systematically
> rebuilding the economic and social structures under the guiding
> hand of the IMF (dominated by the same Western banking interests
> that control the international financial system and who pulled the
> plug on the tigers). What took MacCarthur, so to speak, a gener-
> ation to accomplish in Japan is being done in a fortnight by
> the IMF in SE Asia. And recent developments indicate Japan itself
> may be brought to its knees in the same way, and of course it
> will be re-programmed in the same way by the IMF.
Oh? Japan is the world's biggest creditor, my friend ($1 trillion in net
assets and counting); the US is the world's biggest debtor. Japan has been
buying Godzilla-sized quantities of T-bills during the 1990s, keeping US
interest rates low and enabling Wall Street to run riot in one of the
great financial manias of world history. Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong
are efficient exporters and sit on a mountain of foreign exchange
reserves. The sick tigers are mostly Second World countries, who went
under thanks to rampant currency inflows and deregulation (Indonesia and
Thailand had very weak developmental states, South Korea caught a bad case
of the neoliberal virus in the early Nineties and deregulated everything
in sight, and is paying for its hubris). The rest of the tigers have drawn
the appropriate conclusions from the whole mess, and are mostly
reregulating and increasing state supervision of the economy. Also, SE
Asia is being bailed out not by American banks, who own surprisingly
little of SE Asia's debt (see the BIS at www.bis.org for the details on
this), but by Japanese and European banks. The American rentiers
can rant and rave all they like, but the fact remains that their ass is
*owned* by the EU-East Asian co-hegemons.
-- Dennis