Asia and the credit crisis

"Beware the temptation to gloatON SEPTEMBER 26th, as America’s Congress was meeting to debate its bail-out, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s former prime minister, wrote on his blog: “We cannot forget how in 1997-98 American hedge funds destroyed the economies of poor countries by manipulating their national currencies. When as a result of the so-called trade in currencies the companies in the poor countries faced bankruptcy, the governments were told not to bail out any company or bank which was in deep trouble...Yet today we see the US Government readying $700 billion to brazenly bail out banks, mortgage companies and insurance companies...Desperate to avoid a serious recession the US has abandoned all its principles.”It was an authentic voice of Schadenfreude, comparable to the contemporaneous jeering of Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez, who mocked “the era of the Washington Consensus, when we heard that the market would solve everything, that the state was unnecessary” or Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, who claimed that there are “uprisings against a capitalist economic model around the world and if no one understood that capitalism is destroying the planet, then major problems will go unresolved.” ..." (2008-10-22)
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