{"id":"asset_d5c05cbf84fa","type":"text/markdown","category":"text","name":"01-asian-crisis-1997.md","size_bytes":3732,"title":"01 asian crisis 1997","description":"An analytical account of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, its immediate causes in currency and maturity mismatches, and the IMF's policy response. It examines whether the prescribed remedies—rate increases, spending cuts, bank closures, capital account opening—addressed the actual emergency or instead imposed structural demands that benefited foreign creditors while shifting costs to local populations.","extracted_text":"# The Cure That Deepened the Disease: Asia, 1997\n\nIn July 1997 Thailand gave up defending the baht. Within months the contagion\nhad taken Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines. Currencies lost\nhalf their value or more, stock markets fell by two thirds, and economies that\nhad been the standing proof of the development consensus contracted violently.\n\nThe causes were not mysterious. Asian corporates and banks had borrowed heavily\nin dollars while earning in local currency, on the strength of pegs their central\nbanks had promised to defend and could not. Short-term foreign capital had flowed\nin against long-term illiquid assets — property, infrastructure, industrial\novercapacity. When sentiment turned, the maturity mismatch and the currency\nmismatch detonated together. Every borrower needed dollars at once, and the only\nway to get them was to sell the local currency, which made the dollars dearer.\n\nWhat is worth arguing about is the response.\n\nThe IMF arrived with roughly $","attributes":{},"usable_for":["period analysis of imf crisis response","argument about creditor moral hazard","explanation of reserve accumulation policy origins"],"provenance":"original-work","provenance_note":"An original analytical essay by its author.","kind":"analytical essay","reliable_for":"The author's argument about IMF crisis management and its long-term consequences, and the evidence it cites.","describe_v":6,"price_sats":{"card":0,"full":200},"content_available":true,"available":true,"retained_offered":false,"embed_offered":false,"licences":{"single-task":{"sats":200,"grants":"use for one task, then let go"},"retained":null,"embed":null}}