I have no idea what "financial stabilizing" is supposed to mean with respect to excess capacity in South Korea, Thailand and Japan. There are thousands of vacant office buildings, thousands of bankrupt construction companies and thousands of banks that they owe loans to.
The issue is not "Armageddon." It is rather the end of the Asian tiger paradigm. You were stuck in that paradigm for as long as I can remember, arguing that these countries had something in common with the capitalism of England of the 1840s, which inspired those passages in the Communist Manifesto you are so fond of quoting. This was a false premise. The growth in East Asia was fueled by excess capital that could find no profitable outlet in the West. When the speculative bubble was pricked, the capital fled elsewhere. In the Communist Manifesto, it is written:
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."
To assume that this what was going on in East Asia is incorrect. What was going on in East Asia was a completely ephemeral spurt of industrialization that was not rooted in the development of a national bourgeoisie. There is no Thai bourgeoisie to speak of. What took place in Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines was an artificial uptick based on western capitalist speculation. Even in South Korea and Japan, where there was some kind of national bourgeoisie, there are signs that the west is trying to transform them into the declawed tigers that border them to their west. China is also facing major difficulties. These are the realities that Marxists must confront.
Finally, Mark Jones did not talk about Armageddon. He simply predicted that capitalism would go into a signficant slump, especially in Russia. He and Choussourdsky, who you also labeled as "apocalyptic" were the only people making such predictions. They turned out to be correct. Last October, when the market took its first dive, it also rose again. This led you to comment that "everything was groovy." Everything is not groovy, Doug.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)