Word: asian
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Fear and despair returned to Asian stock markets on Friday as a drumbeat of bad economic news helped send share prices across the region plunging to historic losses...
...Other Asian governments faced challenges similar to Japan's during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. In South Korea, for example, the government bought bad loans from banks and also injected government money into their balance sheets. Several banks were nationalized. Governments across the region also shut down financial institutions deemed too weak to survive or warrant a government bailout. In August 1997 Thailand closed 42 finance companies. Indonesia closed 16 banks in October 1997, and Korea closed 14 merchant banks that December, according to Merrill Lynch. This separating the wheat from the chaff helped to speed economic recovery...
...Lessons from the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis come with caveats, since the conditions were markedly different. The crisis was contained to a relatively small number of countries - mainly Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand - in which banks and businesses were unable to pay off debts owed to the outside world. That allowed the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in cooperation with the World Bank and Washington, to organize bailout packages that allowed Asia to get back on its feet...
...current crisis. But the IMF's role will be limited, because the financial turmoil is global. The organization might be able to lend a hand in specific situations. On Thursday the IMF announced it was restarting an emergency lending program that had been active during the 1990s Asian crisis for developing countries. The IMF has already sent a mission to Iceland, which is suffering from a financial meltdown. "All kinds of cooperation has to be recommended," IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told reporters...
...producers have good reason to be nervous. Many are still haunted by a disastrous error made at an Opec meeting in Jakarta in 1999, when the cartel - which produces more than a third of the world's oil - opted to raise its production levels. Within weeks Asian stock markets tumbled, driving world oil prices down to $11 a barrel. Oil officials in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have cited that price crash as the reason they've rebuffed pleas from President Bush to pump more oil. Says Benali: "Countries have learned the lessons of the past...