Anderson weighs in

Christian Gregory christian11 at mindspring.com
Tue Oct 29 06:05:06 PST 2002



> Peter Gowan is the guy who holds the bizarre
belief that at the start of 1997 Larry Summers and Bob Rubin plotted out the Asia crisis in order to destroy the "Asian model" of development?

Where did he say that? I recall that his argument about the US interest in the crises of the 70's and 80's made it seem as if they knew what they were doing all along--ie that 1982 was mapped out in 1971. (I could be misremembering, though.) But I recall him saying, in a more accusatory way, more or less what Stiglitz said about the Asian crisis: namely, that the crisis scenario wasn't even considered, b/c, beforehand, they knew the IMF would "clean it up" in a way which suited them--ie fiscal reform for a liquidity crisis. In the aftermath, they got to say "I told you so," about the Asian miracle. As Stiglitz pointed out, this was pretty comical: the IMF never attributed SE Asia's successes to developmental states, but they were quick to blame them for mismanagement of capital account liberalization.

Christian



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