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In the late 1990s, despite a spectacular stock market boom in the United States, all was not well with the global economy. In rapid succession, Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea spiraled toward economic collapse as international bankers and money managers lost confidence that these nations could repay their debts and maintain the value of their currencies. And as the Asian financial crisis smoldered and flared, the embers spread to Russia and Brazil, bringing the U.S. economy perilously close to disaster in the process.
In this inside look at how the crisis unfolded, Paul Blustein shows how the financial turmoil in Asia caught the International Monetary Fund by surprise and overwhelmed its legions of Ph.D.'s in their efforts to protect against economic destabilization. Over the years, the IMF has cultivated the image of an institution whose masterminds coolly dispense effective economic remedies, but the Asian flu nearly proved too much for the doctors to handle. As markets were sinking and defaults looming, the guardians of global financial stability - IMF officials together with their overseers in the Group of Seven major industrial countries - were often floundering, improvising, feuding among themselves and striking messy compromises. In a world where capital flowed across national borders in much more massive quantities than ever, they were woefully ill-equipped to combat these virulent new strains of investor panics.
