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On sait que certains pays touchés par le tsunami font partie de ces pays asiatiques “émergents” qui, dans les années 1990, connurent de profonds remous économiques. C’est particulièrement le cas pour la Thaïlande et l’Indonésie, deux pays qui furent au départ de l’immense crise économique qui ravagea le monde émergent, en 1997-98, avec les crises économiques notamment en Chine, en Russie, au Brésil.
Cette crise, c’est fondamentalement la “crise de la globalisation” (pas “crise de la mondialisation”). C’est la crise de la dérégulation, conduisant à l’ouverture des marchés hors de toute régulation. Les bouleversements ainsi opérés ont bouleversé le paysage social, culturel et démographique de ces pays. Il existe un lien entre cette situation et le terrible bilan de la catastrophe de l’Asie du Sud. Le 4 janvier, sur une chaîne TV d’information, un dirigeant d’une ONG observait « que si le saccage des structures sociales, de l’environnement, des infrastructures économiques pour installer l’univers globalisé de l’hyper-capitalisme et du “tourisme exotique” n’avait pas été mené au rythme fou où il fut à cause du/ depuis le cataclysme économique de 1997 (la globalisation venue des US), les densités démographiques et sociales dans les pays touchés eussent été complètement différentes, les structures de résistance également, et les pertes humaines provoquées par le tsunami eussent été “très, très largement en-dessous du dixième de ce qui se passe, si bien qu’on n’en aurait pas parlé”. » (cité dans notre texte, rubrique F&C, du 6 janvier 2005)
On comprend l’intérêt de rappeler l’un ou l’autre texte qui permettrait de mieux préciser ce que fut cette crise de 1997-98, d’où elle vint, à quel mécanisme elle répondait. C’est assez édifiant, et cela permet de fixer certaines responsabilités qui sont en général éludées et écartées. Le cataclysme du tsunami est aussi une crise; et ce cataclysme de tous les temps est aussi une crise postmoderne.
Ci-dessous, nous publions deux textes qui éclaireront les conditions dans lesquelles fut réalisée la “révolution de la globalisation” des années 1990. Un premier texte (le premier d’une série de trois publiés en février 1999) explique l’origine stratégique de ce courant révolutionnaire et mondial de la globalisation, son application et ses effets. Les témoignages un peu contrits, emplis de doute, des principaux acteurs de ce mouvement, — ils n’avaient pas le moindre doute lorsqu’ils le lancèrent, — permettent de mesurer la dimension probable de ce qui pourrait être reconnu plus tard comme la perversion économique fondamentale d’une époque. En passant, il est bon de mesurer le rôle et la responsabilité de l’administration Clinton, qu’on est habitué à encenser par contraste avec l’administration GW, dans les événements préliminaires et en bonne partie fondateurs de la situation présente.
Ce premier texte, paru dans l’International Herald Tribune du 16 février 1999, est suivi d’un second, dans le même journal, à la date du 1er mars 1999. C’est un brillant commentaire du premier texte, fait par William Pfaff pour mieux situer l’ampleur de la démarche et de ses effets catastrophiques.
By Nicholas D. Kristof and David E. Sanger, International Herald Tribune, February 16, 1999
They were serious men, prosperous and pinstriped, and they derided ''the politics of class warfare'' as they conducted a job interview with the young governor from Arkansas.
It was steak dinner in a private room of the ''21'' Club in New York in June 1991, and the top Democratic executives on Wall Street were gathered at a round table to hold one of a series of meetings with presidential aspirants in what an organizer called ''an elegant cattle show.''
They were questioning a man with a meager salary but a silver tongue, and this was another show in which Governor Bill Clinton charmed his way to a blue ribbon by impressing the executives with his willingness to embrace free trade and free markets.
''What was discussed was the need for the Democratic Party to have a new and much more forward-looking economic policy,'' Roger Altman, a leading investment banker and an organizer of the evening, recalled recently. ''The Democratic Party needed to move into a new economic world.''
Aides describe that evening as an important step in the business education of Mr. Clinton, who came to repeat and amplify the themes, especially the need to move away from protectionism and push for more open markets in Asia and all over the world.
It was also the time that Mr. Clinton first met Robert Rubin, then the head of Goldman Sachs & Company, and although the initial encounter was cool, the two men eventually forged a close partnership that has left an enormous imprint on the global economy.
Mr. Clinton and Mr. Rubin, who became his treasury secretary in 1995, took the American passion for free trade and carried it further to press for freer movement of capital. Along the way, they pushed harder to win opportunities for American banks, brokerages and insurance companies.
This drive for free movement of capital as well as goods was one factor in the long American-led boom in financial markets around the globe. Yet, in retrospect, Washington's 'policies also fostered vulnerabilities that are an underlying cause of the economic crisis that began in Thailand in July 1997, rippled through Asia and Russia, and is now shaking Brazil and Latin America.
Countries like Thailand and Russia and Brazil are in trouble today largely for internal reasons, including poor banking practices and speculation that soared out of control. But some economists also say that if those countries had weak foundations, it is partly because Washington helped supply the blueprints.
They argue that the Clinton administration pushed too hard for financial liberalization and freer capital flows allowing foreign money to stream into these countries and local money to move out. In many cases, foreign countries were happy to open up in this way because they thought it was the best road to economic development, but a wealth of evidence has shown that over-hasty liberalization can lead to banking chaos and financial crises
Even some former administration officials acknowledge that they went too far. Mickey Kantor, the former trade representative and commerce secretary, now says that the United States was insufficiently aware of the kind of chaos that financial liberalization could provoke.
''It would be a legitimate criticism to say that we should have been more nuanced, more foresighted that this could happen,'' he said.
Speaking of the risks of financial liberalization without modern banking and legal systems, he compared them to ''building a skyscraper with no foundation.''
Although the Clinton administration always talked about financial liberalization as the best thing for other countries, it is also clear that it pushed for free capital f1ows in part because this was what its supporters in the banking industry wanted.
''Our financial services industry wanted into these markets,'' said Laura D' Andrea Tyson, the former chairman of Mr. Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and later head of the National Economic Council.
Ms. Tyson says she disagreed to some extent with the push and was concerned about ''a tendency to do this as a blanket approach, regardless of the size of a country or the development of a country.''
Free capital flows, she worried, could overwhelm small countries or those with weak banking and legal systems, leading to a ''run on a country.''
This is not to say that American officials are primarily to blame for the crisis. Responsibility can be assigned all around, not only to Washington policymakers, but also to the officials and bankers in emerging-market countries who created the mess; to Western bankers and investors who blindly handed them money; to Western officials who hailed free capital flows and neglected to make them safer; to Western scholars and journalists who wrote paeans to emerging markets and the ''Asian Century'' - and to the people who planned an empty city named Muang Thong Thani.
Muang Thong Thani rises up above barren fields on the edge of Bangkok. It is a dazzling complex of two dozen huge gray-white buildings soaring nearly 30 stories high and surrounded by streets lined with shops, town houses .and detached home. Walk closer and it feels eerie, for it is a ghost city.
Along one street of 100 houses, the windows are mere holes in the walls, and yards have weeds that grow as high as a person.
Muang Thong Thani was built during Thailand's boom as a product of free capital flows and financial liberalization. It was the great dream of Anant Kanjanapas.
One of 11 children born to an ethnic Chinese business tycoon in Thailand. Mr. Anant grew up with the wealth that his family had acquired through developing property and selling watches in Asia.
The family's Bangkok Land company began acquiring parcels of property near the airport. and they broke ground in 1990 on a megaproject to build a privately owned satellite city for Bangkok. Muang Thong Thani was to have a population of 700.000, bigger than Boston's.
The project was greeted enthusiastically, as all proposals were in the early 1990s, and Bangkok Land issued shares on the Thai Stock Exchange in 1992 to raise money. Its shares were hot, picked up by J. Mark Mobius, the. emerging-markets guru, and by funds like the Thai International Fund and the Thai Euro Fund, which between them bought more than one million shares of Bangkok Land.
Free movement of capital is nothing new, for it was the norm during most of Western history. At the beginning of this century, anyone could move money across borders without difficulty.
The Great Depression changed all that. Governments moved to control capital so as to avoid what they saw as the chaos of capital rushing out of countries and triggering financial crises.
The result was that most countries of the world, including the United States in the 1960s, limited the right of companies and citizens to buy foreign securities or invest overseas. People were often allowed to buy only small amounts of foreign currency.
Then, as memories of the Depression faded, the tide shifted again in the 1970s and '80s. Starting in the United States and Europe, it became fashionable to let money move freely, and the Reagan administration began to push for free capital flows in other countries.
The Clinton administration inherited that agenda and amplified it. Previous administrations had pushed for financial liberalization principally In Japan, but under Mr. Clinton it became a worldwide effort directed at all kinds of countries, even smaller ones much less able to absorb it than Japan.
''We pushed full steam ahead on all areas of liberalization, including financial,'' recalled Jeffrey Garten, a former senior Commerce Department official who is now dean of the Yale School of Management. ''I never went on a trip when my brief didn't include either advice or congratulations on liberalization.''
This push for financial liberalization reflected Mr. Clinton's growing enthusiasm for markets and his desire to make the economy a centerpiece of his foreign policy. He created the National Economic Council as a counterpart to the National Security Council, and asked Mr. Rubin to be its first bead. More broadly, this push was part of a global ideological shift in favor of free markets, as well as an increasing enthusiasm among developing countries themselves for 1ifting restrictions on the flow of money.
''We were convinced we were moving with the stream,'' Mr. Garten said, ''and that our job was to make the stream move faster.''
Mr. Garten said he could not recall hearing any doubts expressed about the policy, either within the administration or among officials overseas. Referring to Mr. Rubin, Mr. Kantor and former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Mr. Garten said, ''There wasn't a fiber in those three bodies - or in mine - that didn't want to press as a matter of policy for more open markets wherever you could make it happen.''
''It's easy to see in retrospect that we probably pushed too far, too fast.'' he said, adding, ''In retrospect, we overshot, and in retrospect, there was a certain degree of arrogance.''
The push for financial liberalization was directed at Asia in particular, largely because it was seen as a potential gold mine for American banks and brokerages. Neither Mr. Clinton nor Mr. Rubin had much experience in Asia - Mr. Clinton as governor had led trade delegation to promote Arkansas chickens and rice, and Mr. Rubin had done business in Japan for Goldman Sachs. But Mr. Clinton as president has worked hard to strengthen American ties with Asia, as well as his own.
The idea was to press Asia to ease its barriers to American goods and financial services, helping Fidelity sell mutual funds, Citibank sell checking accounts and American International Group sell insurance. Mr. Clinton's links to Asia caused embarrassment after they led to the campaign finance scandals of 1996, but fundamentally, they reflected an appetite for business opportunities in Asian countries that had changed, as Mr. Clinton once put it, ''from dominoes to dynamos.''
His cabinet approved a ''big emerging markets'' plan to identify 10 rising economic powers and push relentlessly to win business for American companies there. Under Mr. Brown, the Commerce Department even built what it called a war room, where computers tracked big contracts, and everyone from the CIA to ambassadors to the president himself was called upon to help land deals.
Freer flow of money pumped up the Thai economy, and with the help of foreign cash Mr. Anant began to realize his dream. Muang Thong Thani gradually emerged from the surrounding fields, with its skyscrapers focused on a business district called Bond Street.
The result is that since the crash, Muang Thong Thani has everything but inhabitants. Bond Street is a mile-and-a-quarter strip of modern, window-lined buildings, but aside from a handful of colourful storefronts - a bank, a restaurant, a pharmacy and a few others - they are empty.
The command center for free markets is the third floor of the U. S. Treasury, where Mr. Rubin and his deputy, Lawrence Summers, share a Suite facing the Washington Monument. Mr. Rubin presides in a spacious office.
Historically, the Treasury has tended to slake out free-market positions; but Mr. Rubin stepped up the pace even further, for he showed an intuitive tilt toward the market based on his three decades as an investment banker.
Within the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin and Mr. Summers won increasing influence because of their skill at marrying international finance and foreign policy. Mr. Summers had been a prominent economics professor at Harvard, and Mr. Rubin had made a fortune on Wall Street, enabling him to take off on vacations with a fly-fishing rod that, as an aide joked, ''probably costs more than your house.''
Within the administration, there were occasional arguments about the virtues of free capital flows. Academic economists like Ms. Tyson and Joseph Stiglitz, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, sometimes argued that the Treasury was too dogmatic in insisting upon free flows.
But there is considerable evidence that top administration officials were involved in some efforts to seek freer capital flows, as when they pressed South Korea to liberalize its financial system.
After interagency discussions, the administration dangled an attractive bait: If Korea gave in, it would be allowed to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of industrialized nations.
''To enter the OECD,'' recalled a senior official of the organization, ''the Koreans agreed to liberalize faster than they had originally planned. They were concerned that if they went too fast, a number of their financial institutions would be unable to adapt.''
In the end, Korea opened up the wrong way: It kept restrictions on long-term investments like buying Korean companies, but it dropped those on short-term money like bank loans, which could be pulled out quickly.
A flood of capital poured into emerging markets in the early and mid-l990s, including $93 billion in 1996 alone into just five countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand. Then there was a net outflow of $12 billion from those five countries in 1997. This turnabout, which was most evident in short-term loans, amounted to a financial hurricane, one that would harm any country in the world.
So, while economists welcome free capital flows in principle, extensive scholarly work had clearly established the importance of ''sequencing,'' meaning that countries should liberalize capital flows only after building up hank supervision and a legal infrastructure. A French scholar, Charles Wyplosz, of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, concludes in an academic paper that ''financial market liberalization is the best predictor of currency crisis.''
[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”.]
By William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, March 1, 1999
PARIS - There has been remarkably little reaction to the splendid articles on the international economic crisis, prepared by an editorial team led by Nicholas Kristof that appeared from Feb.15 to 18 in The New York Times (IHT. Feb. 16 to 19, 1999).
Moderate and judicious in tone, the series reveals the extent to which the crisis of the globalized economy (not yet over) was unnecessary, the unanticipated product of a self-interested policy that originated in the American financial community and was taken up by the U.S. government.
During the past decade, the conventional wisdom of governments and international economic organizations, as well as of much of the university economic policy community and the press, has been that deregulation and ''globalization'' of the international economy have been a natural, even inevitable development.
That view has held that globalization results from technological innovations in communications, from banking and industrial organization, and ultimately from the economic reality that international trade exploiting the comparative advantage of national economies produces progress for all.
Resistance to globalization has been considered futile. Objections to it - based on political or social arguments concerning the ability of such nations as Russia or Indonesia to function responsibly in a globalized economy - have been dismissed. It was said that market forces would automatical1y correct excesses and enforce the general interest.
This belief was not universally shared among political economists. It originated as the sectarian enthusiasm of a minority of writers and theorists in Britain and the United States, beginning in the 1970s, and it derived more from their political hostility to ''big government'' than from objective economic analysis. It was an argument naturally appealing in business circles and the financial community.
The New York Times series documents the process by which international financial deregulation was sold by Wall Street to the Clinton administration (indeed, to Bill Clinton while he was still governor of Arkansas), causing it to aggressively promote global deregulation and use the political power of the United States to remake world finance.
Jeffrey Garten of the Yale University School of Management, who was an official in the Commerce Department during Mr. Clinton's first term, says, ''We were convinced that we were moving with the stream.'' He and his colleagues pressed ''as a matter of policy for more open markets wherever you could make it happen.''
''Although the Clinton administration always talked about financial liberalization as the best thing for other countries,'' Mr. Kristof notes, ''it is also clear that it pushed for free capital flows in part because this is what its supporters in the banking industry wanted. ''
The success of this campaign produced a fundamental change in the world economy, with consequences yet to be fully felt. Goods and commodities were replaced, as the principal components of international trade, by stocks, bonds and currencies. The global financial market replaced the global economy. The total worth of financia1 derivatives traded in 1997 was 12 times the worth of the entire world economy.
When crisis arrived that year, the same investors who had profited from globalized markets worsened the crisis by speculating against newly weakened currencies. The United States used its own resources and those of the IMF to rescue Western investors and U.S. and European banks. That is now generally acknowledge.
The countries that were the victims of the crisis were pressed by Washington to adopt measures of austerity, imposing severe economic and social costs on their populations - a policy that is now widely conceded to have been wrong.
Mr. Kristof adds that ''when the crisis seemed as if it might strike the United States,'' in September 1998, ''the administration had a change of heart'' about austerity as the appropriate response. ''Mr. Clinton [welcomed] three interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, pressing Europe and others to cut rates as well,'' and the Federal Reserve arranged the rescue of Long-Term Capital management.
To millions in Asia, Russia and Latin America, deregulation of the international economy must look like a vast swindle. It was not, in fact, a swindle. It was something perhaps worse. It was an irresponsible and, in crucial respects, disastrous experiment, inspired by ideology, promoted by Western groups that expected to profit from it, backed by the power of the U.S government.
The more prominent victims were Indonesia, Thailand, China, Russia and Brazil, and the affair is not over.
Western defenders of the experiment argue that despite all that went wrong, there has been a large net increase in international growth and wealth. This does not take into account the political carnage. That, unfortunately, has in the past proved to be the outcome of economic crises which has the most lasting consequences.
[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”.]
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