Word: rubins
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That's where Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin met on Dec. 18 with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and their top aides to craft a new approach to the Korean credit crisis, which they had long underestimated, at least in public. The three-hour dinner was a turning point in a months-long U.S. journey from backroom player to more visible leader in a global effort to solve the financial crunch. For months, Rubin & Co. had played down the crisis and balked at committing U.S. taxpayer dollars to a bailout that would help South Korea and the big financial institutions around...
...feels its way as the lone superpower, finds that the tools it needs to lead are not aircraft carriers and armored divisions but emergency stabilization funds and better accounting practices. Inside the Clinton Administration, the man working these delicate new levers is Treasury Secretary Rubin. For the past 50 years, private banks like J.P. Morgan had led the way, picking over the wreckage of a remote foreign collapse. In a newer world, where "remote" economies no longer exist and where many more players make many more investments in many more nations, the game has been reversed. Only one government, whose...
Though the Treasury Secretary is supposed to manage the American economy, Bob Rubin has discovered that a big part of the job comes down to managing the economies of nations overseas. After taking a shellacking from Congress in 1995 for successfully bailing out Mexico with $20 billion in taxpayer-backed loans, Rubin was hardly eager to get out front in the Asian economic crunch. As the liquidity crisis swept across Southeast Asia last summer, Rubin and other U.S. officials urged the International Monetary Fund to take the lead. Washington did not regard the Thai or Malaysian economy as vital...
...when the Asian contagion reached the Korean peninsula in September, Rubin could no longer soft-pedal the problem. South Korea is the world's 11th largest economy, America's fifth biggest trading partner, and home base for 37,000 U.S. troops who guard the border with a hostile, if starving, North Korea. Nearly every nation, from the U.S. to Slovenia, had a piece of Korea's foreign debt, and none held more than Japanese banks, which, by the standards of U.S. bank examiners, are themselves in varying states of insolvency. It didn't take much imagination...
Shortly thereafter, on Dec. 3, the IMF announced a $57 billion package of loans. In return, South Korea agreed to open its financial markets, lower trade barriers and revise its banking structure--moves demanded by Rubin and transmitted to the IMF. Mindful of the likely congressional reaction, the U.S. offered only to provide a small amount in loans--but not unless necessary. American officials played down the crisis. Clinton called the Asian markets a "glitch." Still, the markets kept glitching. After a brief rise, South Korea's stock market plunged again. By mid-December more than $1 billion...