March 21, 2009

Seared into Southeast Asia's collective memory is the iconic image of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, where International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Michel Camdessus towered with crossed arms over a bent-down Indonesian President Suharto as he signed a sovereignty-eroding bailout agreement for his distressed economy.Now with Wall Street's historic collapse, many in the region eagerly anticipate a reciprocal Kodak moment, with a US investment banker signing over his once-prestigious financial assets to an acquiring Japanese banker, Chinese money manager or perhaps even Singapore's champion of state-led capitalism, Lee Kuan Yew.

If Wall Street has its nationalistic way, they will have to wait. A decade ago, Western-led free marketeers derided Asia's lightly regulated economic and financial models for being riddled with corruption, cronyism and overall mismanagement. The only way out of the financial crisis, they argued, and on what the IMF predicated its bailout packages, was greater foreign participation and management in their economies through asset sales and privatizations.Governments in the region resisting IMF neo-liberal orthodox prescriptions and market-determined asset fire sales to foreigners were widely derided in the Western press.