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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (1460)	1/23/1998 12:16:00 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9980

Has anyone read Lester Thurow's take on the Asian crisis in the New York Review of Books? I found it to be typically lucid and trenchant.Too rich to summarize the whole thing, don't know if they have it on the Web or not (tend to doubt it). Perhaps I will try to prepare a slight summary of it this weekend, and post. But if anyone has access to it, I would interested in hearing reactions. Especially to his end, where he says that in the grand scheme of things, these Asian earthquakes are still only minor quakes. The Big Kahuna may come as a result of the EU getting their act together on their common currency. His reasoning is that no country can continue to run the kind of trade deficits that US has run over the past couple of decades without suffering terrible consequences unless their currency is the world's reserve currency (which effectively means, I think, a stand-in for what "gold" used to mean to the world). When the EU common currency is a reality (or if, I should say, not when--some people in Germany are trying to stop it, and w/o Germany behind it, it won't happen), then it may become a viable alternative the US$ for that status. If that happens in the current environment, watch out below. I should add that this was all in the context of his earlier argument that Asian crisis is not due only to corruption, it is structural. That is, the Four Tigers and Japan developed the export driven model to the Road to Posterity. That was OK for them, but when Thailand, India, China and Indonesia joined the party, too much production capacity comes on line. It is all exacerbated, of course, by corruption and debt financing. But only so much can be exported, so everyone can't make it to Economic Nirvana with this model. In order to put their economies on sound ground, they have to start focussing on developing internal growth, so that they are not as dependent on exports. This of course is easier said than done. It means among other things that they have to develop a stronger and larger middle class. And they can't just throw their resources into a few big companies. There is much more, the argument is more complex than this, but I don't have it in front of me, and read it quickly two nights ago; if there is any interest, I will try to develop a better summary in the next few days. Regards, Sam

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (1460)	1/23/1998 12:16:00 PM
From: Worswick	Respond to of 9980

From time to time I want to post snipetts of Indian dementia. My old tutor at Santinikan aka. Vishva Bharati University), a man who used to write the subtitles to Satyagit Ray's films, first introduced to this aspect of "India watching". For private use (C)SCMP "Lodha people, branded as criminals by the colonial British administration and treated as untouchables since independence, are turning over a new leaf with the help of a dedicated police officer. K. L. Tamta, police superintendent of Bankura district in West Bengal, says his objective is to make the 40,000 Lodhas of Punisole "realise that toiling the whole day for a meagre income brings more happiness than robbing people". His efforts have met success. Not a single case of theft, robbery, burglary or murder has been registered against any Lodha anywhere in the past 20 months, creating a record.