The Asian vs. The Euro Crisis

So, I’m feeling young again — well, middle-aged, anyway. The rupiah is plunging again!

I was one of those economists for whom the Asian crisis of 1997-1998 came as a disturbing revelation, a demonstration that events all too reminiscent of the Great Depression could still happen in the modern world. Between the acute crises in Southeast Asia and the long stagnation in Japan, it was — or so I thought — all too clear that we did not, in fact, have this thing under control. Unfortunately, not enough people grasped that lesson, and a decade later we had a global crisis that made the Asian crisis look trivial by comparison.