> > 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.
And besides, wasn't the whole Clinton-Rubin-Summers push to "liberalize" East Asia all about pushing the region towards U.S. finance/governance models in the first place? Surely they knew that the "Asian model" depended on regulating trade and capital flows and repressing finance, and that's why they targeted those things. You don't have to be a conspiracist to believe that - you just have to have been reading a good newspaper.
Doug