Returning to stage 1, we find ourselves at the scene of battle, the victors - of whatever nationality or origin - riding off into the sunset with their spoils, the vanquished left to survey a vista of devastation, of bitter defeat. After initially refusing to accept the prospect of having its nation rescued by external elements, the Thai government capitulated on August 20th 1997, financial support for Thailand in the form of a USD17.2 billion aid package that was approved by the IMF. Indonesia followed suit on November 20t and Korea on December 4t of that year. For Thailand, a nation which has never in its history been colonised, succumbing to the pressures of the global market and requiring a national bailout package must have equated to national surrender and subjugation. A package of some USD17.2 billion was put together by the IMF involving multilateral aid from itself, the World Bank and the ADB, plus bilateral aid from Japan, Australia and a number of Asian countries. The specific break up of this is as follows:
Thailand:
commitments
Multilateral USD6.6 billion
IMF 3.9
World Bank 1.5
ADB 1.2
Bilateral USD10.5 billion
Japan 4.0
Australia 1
China 1
Hong Kong 1
Malaysia 1
Indonesia 0.5
Brunei 0.5
Korea 0.5
Total USD17.2 billion
Source: Official Data
Yet, the IMF-arranged bailout package did not come with out strings attached, without a strict programme of terms and conditions which governments had to follow in order to receive further loan disbursements from the package. The IMF stepped into the crisis, armed with its standard programme of belt tightening and austerity measures to cure the ills of any emerging market crisis. In the specific case of Thailand, this is interesting because IMF officials had warned that country’s government on several occasions that the size of their current account deficit was becoming unsustainably large and that it would eventually cause economic dislocation. One must presume that the economists concerned conducting this analysis, whether in Washington or Bangkok extended that analysis to the reasons behind such a significant expansion of the current account deficit and in addition that deficit’s implications. If they had extended that analysis - and surely the presumption is not unreasonable - they would have discovered that the underlying ‘cause et effet” was over-investment in private sector projects relative to what was already stratospheric savings’ rates by Western standards. Armed with this knowledge, they might subsequently have examined the public fiscal account for evidence of imbalance - and found little or none. How to explain this? This surely did not fit the standard model?! Here, one has to say that such an extension of what is pretty basic economic analysis is itself relatively elementary and basic. No great leap of intellect or imagination is required, though admittedly data transparency was an important issue. It is mere logic to assume that someone seeing substantial imbalance and taking the trouble to note that would look for the causes of that imbalance and - bearing in mind the many lessons of the Mexican currency crisis of 1995 - would equally examine for imbalance elsewhere, notably in the fiscal account. Let us assume then that the IMF did exactly that. And as a result, they brought out a report warning the Thai government as to the danger of running such a large current account deficit. They might not have known the size or degree of the Thai corporate short- term foreign currency debt - indeed they probably had no idea of this given that the Thai government seemed similarly unaware - but they must have known that the current account deficit was produced by private rather than public over-investment - remember, that one way of expressing the current account balance is simply savings minus investment. The fact that the public accounts had been in surplus for a decade up until the fourth quarter of 1996 would have confirmed this.
They might, or might not have subsequently examined the available data on private debt, more specifically the data from the Bangkok International Banking Facility (BIBF). If they had done so, they would have tied the two ends together - excessive private investment being fuelled by private, short-term debt, most of it in foreign currency
Of course, I admit fully that much of this is speculative. What is a fact however is that the IMP produced several reports warning Thailand as to the potential economic dangers of its unsustainably high current account deficit. A further fact is that Thailand did absolutely nothing about these reports so a considerable degree of blame for the ensuing crisis must be put firmly at the door of the Thai authorities themselves. This does not however detract from what is a reasonable assumption, that the IMP looked at the reasons behind that growing current account deficit. If one can accept that assumption, then one must come to what is an uncomfortable conclusion. After all, the IMP implemented its standard programme of conditions in Thailand, yet the assumption that the IMP examined specific reasons for Thailand’s current account deficit requires an expectation that they found those reasons, and equally the realisation that these said reasons potentially required different policies and conditions for implementation within the overall bailout programme. Theoretically, the IMF officials responsible for Thailand might have suggested an entirely different and more specific set of policies, based on their greater knowledge of the situation on the ground and the IMP might have completely ignored this and applied their standard programme of remedies despite this being ill suited to the crisis concerned. This is the uncomfortable conclusion that one might come to, armed only with the words and deeds of the official IMF statements. Speculative? Undoubtedly, but by no means a leap of faith. Either the IMF surveillance procedures in place before the Asian crisis did not work, and thus the IMP must itself accept part of the blame (though we know this was not the case given the IMF warning to Thailand), or they did work. But if they did work, why did the crisis happen in the first place? There are two possible reasons: one is that the IMF board ignored their reports, the other is that the countries concerned ignored the warnings. In all likelihood, both were the case.
This had profound implications not only for the initial onset of the crisis, but for its subsequent worsening and for the policies aimed at stopping its progress. Those policies, whatever the findings of IMF staffers or their surveillance procedures, were the same, standard IMF medicine, the same policy responses which the IMF would use in most if not all crises no matter what their characteristics, above all the same IMF mind-set:
• Tighten fiscal policy
• Tighten monetary policy
• Liberalise and deregulate capital markets
• Strengthen supervisory institutions
Most or all of these might seem eminently reasonable to readers, yet the combination of these was not necessarily appropriate in the case of the Asian crisis. For one thing, they were aimed at public spending profligacy, a characteristic of the typical Latin American debt and currency crisis. For another, by combining loan bailouts and tightening the fiscal and monetary policy with the additional requirement of market opening and tighter supervision, they potentially confused the essential aim of the bailout plan itself. Was it to stop the slide, or was it to manage the economy? Here, the criticisms of some Asian countries, namely that more should have been done at an earlier stage, that more money should have been lent and without conditions are potentially valid. If larger loan packages had been arranged at an earlier stage, without market opening conditions and private sector debtors and creditors had been encouraged to negotiate debt rollovers, far less financial and economic chaos might have ensued. If. only. But such criticism is largely self-serving in any case. For one thing, it is not for a beggar to decide the terms of aid. For another, like the CEO of a corporation, a national government is ultimately responsible for the successful running of its country’s policies. Failure is and should be met by summary dismissal.
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