CITY AND SUBURBAN
Those Asian tigers have turned into pussy-kyats there must be a conspiracy
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
It's all a conspiracy. We can take that from Muhammad Matathir, Malaysia's vocal Prime Minister. The rogue speculator George Soros is in it and so is the Interna- tional Monetary Fund. They have gone tiger-shooting all round south-east Asia. They have massacred its markets and its currencies — the Thai baht, the Philippine peso, the Indonesian rupiah and the ring- git, Dr Matathir's pet. They have even taken a pot shot at the Hong Kong dollar. (The little Burmese kyat seems to have escaped.) It is an ecological disaster. All those wonderful tiger economies have been left looking more like pussy-kyats. At such times, conspiracy theories come in handy, but reality is more instructive. These economies were growing when the rest of the world was in the doldrums. Western bankers and investors (Japanese, too) spot- ted them as winners and began to back them. So much money poured in that growth became a self-fulfilling prophecy. In Thailand, Dr Matathir's northern neigh- bours set off on a binge of investment in shares and property, financed by new com- panies formed for the purpose. It ended, as such binges do, in tears, failures and fright. Money stopped flowing in, tried to flow out and got jammed in the exits. The baht's link to the dollar snapped. The IMF's riot squad arrived to restore credit and order, or try to — but not in time to stop the trou- ble spreading to other markets and other currencies. I can see this from the Doctor's point of view. While the decadent West was content to pour its money in, everybody was kept happy, so why stop? Money com- ing in could pass as constructive invest- ment. Money going out must be specula- tion and conspiracy.
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