View From Asia

By Walden Bello

September 24, 2008

Manila

Many Asians absorb what is happening in Wall Street with a combination of déjà vu, skepticism and "I-told-you-so."

For many, the Wall Street crisis is a replay, though on a much larger scale, of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which brought down the red-hot "tiger economies" of the East. The shocking absence of Wall Street regulation brings back awful memories of the elimination of capital controls by East Asian governments, which were under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury Department. That move triggered a tsunami of speculative capital onto Asian markets that sharply receded after sky-high land and stock prices came tumbling down.

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About Walden Bello

Walden Bello, professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, is the author of Dilemmas of Domination (Holt) more...
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