Pundits who want to sound judicious are fond of warning against generalizing. Each country is different, they say, and no one story fits all of Asia. This is, of course, silly, all of these economies plunged into economic crisis within a few months of each other, so they must have had something in common.
In fact, the logic of catastrophe was pretty much the same in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea. (Japan is a very different story. ) In each case investors--mainly, but not entirely, foreign banks who had made short-term loans--all tried to pull their money out at the same time. The result was a combined banking and currency crisis, a banking crisis because no bank can convert all its assets into cash on short notice, a currency crisis because panicked investors were trying not only to convert long-term assets into cash, but to convert baht or rupiah into dollars. In the face of the stampede, governments had no good options. If they let their currencies plung
A. were far from a panacea in all cases
B. were feasible in their recipient countries
C. failed to work in their recipient countries
D. were rejected unanimously by Asian countries
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