Folks,
This is just a great article ... well worth the read.
I've been sending articles from time to time to a handful of friends and family members ... I imagine a bunch of you do the same, and this was one I sent on, with the preface below:
here's an absolutely superb article on the beginnings of the global economic crisis, from today's New York Times. It's long and rambling as it meanders about the topic, but it reads like a chapter from Gibbon in its historic, panoramic sweep. Great article!
Key quotes:
[big picture on the crisis ... for all of us to keep in mind]
<<It is still not clear that the financial upheavals, which began in
Thailand in July 1997, will ever damage the United States. But the
collapse of Brazil's currency in January and the jolt it gave markets
worldwide underscored the continuing risks of "the most serious
financial crisis in half a century," as President Clinton called it in
his State of the Union address.
...
"More and more people are asking whether the international financial
system as it has operated for most of the 1990s is basically unstable,"
Ian McFarlane, governor of Australia's central bank, said at a recent
conference in Singapore. "And I think by now the majority of observers
have come to the conclusion that it is."
...
Experts continue to worry about the danger of
a global recession or worse, and about the risk that economic woes may
tear apart countries like Indonesia and even China.
...
What does all this portend? And how can it be that, as David Hale, chief
economist of the Zurich Group, describes the financial upheaval of the
last year and a half, "a real-estate crisis in Bangkok set in motion
something that has no parallel in human history"?>> |
