(by guest blogger, Andy Jackson)
I just wanted to give readers at the Hole a heads up that my latest TCS Daily article is up. It is on the Korean governments reaction to the rise of the won against the dollar and its ‘war’ on foreign speculators. Here is a sample:
To this day, most Koreans refer to the Asian financial crisis as ??IMF.?? Many Koreans felt that the IMF??s program was a national humiliation that subjugated Korea to western (especially American) control. Many blame mercurial ??foreign speculators?? without noting the factors that caused the flight of foreign capital (such as a lack of transparency in corporate management and government intervention in the banking industry to funnel loans to favored companies and projects).
Today, foreign speculators are still the bogeyman and Vice Minister of Finance and Economy Kwon Tae-Shin said that the won??s rise ??cannot be seen as normal?? and that its rise was the result of ??speculative forces?? that, according to a news account, the Korean government would deal with harshly
Now, those are some nice run-on sentences indeed.
It’s a short read, but I think it is pretty good (of course).
3 Comments
Andy, the article link is not working as of now.
I guess it is easy to blame everyone else for one’s mistakes and shortcomings.
To this day, most Koreans refer to the Asian financial crisis as ‘IMF.’ Many Koreans felt that the IMF’s program was a national humiliation that subjugated Korea to western (especially American) control. Many blame mercurial ‘foreign speculators’ without noting the factors that caused the flight of foreign capital (such as a lack of transparency in corporate management and government intervention in the banking industry to funnel loans to favored companies and projects).
Well, I don’t comment much nowadays, but this sounds completely misguided. The reference to the Asian financial crisis in 1997 as “IMF” is actually due to an (inappropriate) abbreviation of “IMF Crisis” (as they used to call the economic crisis in the U.K. in 1976), rather than a matter of putting the blame on something else. It’s a case of bad language (some blogger would call it “??? ????”) that somehow “stuck” as a bad habit for sure, but not a problem with attitude. There was plenty of talk on TV in 1997 about how structural mismanagement, etc. led to the catastrophe, and I don’t remember Koreans kicking anyone else but themselves for it.
Now they usually call it the “Financial Crisis”. I haven’t heard “IMF Crisis” in a long while.