ard of living. Businesses large and small were driven to bankruptcy by the sudden drying up of credit; within a year, millions of workers had lost jobs while prices of basic foodstuffs soared.
As the crisis unfolded, IMF officials flew to Asia to arrange a bailout, agreeing ultimately to loan $ 120 billion to Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea. When announcing these loans, the press used terms like "emergency assistance" and "international rescue package, "leading the casual reader to presume that the money will be spent on food for the hungry, or aid to the jobless. In float, the money is used to "Help" countries pay bank their debts to international banks and brokerage houses. Which international banks and brokerage house? The same ones who made speculative loans in the first place, then panicked and brought about the collapse of the Asian economies. The IMF rescue packages are intended only to rescue the Western creditors.
The Western financial industry, moreover, has been lobbying heavily for even more secure protection from future losses. One plan, put forward last year by the US and US Treasuries, envisions a $ 90 billion fund of public money, supposedly to avert currency crises. The idea is that G7 governments will, henceforth, underwrite the finance industry's speculative ventures into emerging, markets before, rather than after, they turn sour. In this way, when bankers and fund mangers grow bored with a particular market, withdraw their funds and send the currency into a tailspin, they can collect on their losses immediately, without the tedious and time-consuming delays generated by IMF negotiations.
The industry has also been working overtime to squelch defensive government action against their speculative attacks. At a recent conference in New York City, economist Jagdish Bhagwati noted that the IMF and the US Government, despite repeated crises and heavy criticism have intensities pressures on countries to lift exchange controls. The IMF recently proposed changing its Articles of Agreement so as to require countries to permit even more freedom for financial speculations. Echoing this sentiment, US Treasury official Lawrence Summers decried efforts by Malaysia, Hong Kong and other to curb foreign lending, calling capital controls "a catastrophe" and urging countries to "open up to foreign financial service "providers, and all the competition, capital and expertise they bring with them.
Critics of IMF and US policy have, of course, noted that the combination of free flowing capital and bailout funds are a boon to banks other creditors. Such IMF critics as financier George Soros and Harvard's Jeffrey Sachs complain that the game of international speculation and bailout played by the Western financial establishment-in which hot money rushes into a country, then pulls out, leaving behind a wrecked economy to be cleaned up by local governments and G7 taxpayers-is a menace to world ec...
