Asian Financial Crisis

by Nicola Bullard
“The IMF bill is a hot-potato, and as we get closer to the November congressional election everyone wants it out of the way,’’ says Carol Welch from Friends of the Earth -US. But, so far, the IMF funding bill shows no sign of going away, having been sidetracked yet again in its uncertain progress through the US Congress. Read the rest of this entry »

Vitoon Panyakul
A few years ago, if someone says the Thai economy would come to a brink of collapse soon, everyone would laugh. But now it is the reality, even though many people not yet awake from the shock and come to the term with it yet. Despite the government kept give assurance that the present crisis is still manageable and Thailand would soon return to the fast track of being the miracle tiger of Asia again, everyone else has already suffered from a series of serious economic recession and has no idea whether they can live through it. Read the rest of this entry »

By Nelson Graves

KUALA LUMPUR, (Reuters) – Ahmad Mohamed Qali is staring Asia’s economic future in the face and does not like what he sees.

“I came from far away to work,” the 35-year-old Iranian civil engineer says at a dusty construction site in the heart of Malaysia’s capital. “Then suddenly the ringgit (currency) crashed and everybody said there would be no jobs. So I’m worried.” Read the rest of this entry »

Remarks BY
His Excellency Dr. Surin Pitsuwan
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Thailand
At the Asia Pacific Roundtable
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
1 June 1998
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Mr. Chairman, Excellencies, Distinguished Roundtable Participants,

It is certainly a pleasure to be in Kuala Lumpur again attending this 12th Asia Pacific Roundtable and seeing so many old friends and colleagues. I have lost track of the number of times that I have visited the Malaysian capital over the past year. Not only is KL one of my favourite cities in Asia, but the trip here is quite pleasant. It usually takes me less time to get here than to travel from one part of Bangkok to another! Read the rest of this entry »

By Meredith Woo-Cumings

The question that I am asked to address is how an industrial juggernaut like South Korea–widely touted as the eleventh largest in the world–has ended up in the lap of the International Monetary Fund, and what this portends for an economic system that came to be known as Korea Inc. Rather than revisit the daily unfolding of the Korean financial debacle in the past few weeks, with which you all are familiar, I would rather like to use this occasion to discuss the political and historical logic of the Korean economic system, so that that we can better discern the parameters of current and future Korean (and American) action. When we do that, I think we may find that the IMF has bitten off a lot more than it may be able to chew, let alone digest. Read the rest of this entry »

by Theodore Friend
Theodore Friend is Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is president emeritus of the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships and former president of Swarthmore College.

The distress in the Asian economies may be bottoming out. The APEC meeting of 21 Pacific Rim nations has been held, and gone flat. Time now to look at economico-political matters in a way that configures phenomena before and beyond recent waves and troughs. Think from present incoherence toward future community. Read the rest of this entry »

1. General Impact of Economic Crisis
General impact of economic crisis could be summed as widening gap between the haves and have nots. The major victims are those who are living on their working income. The benefited are those who are living on their finance interest and stock speculation. Small or middles sized manufacturing sectors doomed to be bankrupted because of shortage of capital, and high interest rate. Under the turmoil of crisis, the poor became the poorer, and the rich became the richer. Read the rest of this entry »

by: Markus Diehl and Rainer Schweickert

International investors’ enthusiasm with respect to growth prospects in Southeast Asia has been followed by panic. Both the outstanding economic performance of Southeast Asian economies and their ability to master adjustment challenges had led most observers of these economies to the conclusion that “Asia is different”. In comparison with previous currency crises, the macroeconomic fundamentals (GDP growth, inflation, fiscal deficit, external indebtedness, domestic savings, export performance) in the Southeast Asian economies seemed to be consistent with the fixed or quasi-fixed exchange rate regimes. Read the rest of this entry »

The Japanese Crisis of 1990

In 1985-1987 the Japanese authorities have organized massed investing money into the economy. It was done by preferential crediting of commercial banks. And so, the discount rate of Bank of Japan those years was lowered from 5 % to 2,5 %.

Banks amicably rushed to borrow from the state. Naturally, the bankers were unobtrusively hinted that the received funds are best to lend to the construction companies and farmers who had very powerful lobbyists in the ruling Japanese political Liberal Democratic party. As a result, the construction sector got a fantastic boom. Read the rest of this entry »

The Asian Economic Crisis caught most by surprise and raised new questions about the role the media plays in information dissemination. Some question whether the over-inflation of “bubble economies” resulted naturally from exaggerated reports of the region’s economic prowess. Others ask whether the tone and substance of reporting aggravated perceptions of the Crisis as it developed. This panel will explore the role of the media in the period leading up to the economic crisis and question the neutrality of the media in a time of great volatility in the region. Read the rest of this entry »