ABSTRACT
In January and February of 1998, Alan Greenspan (1998a, 1998b, 1998c), the chairman of America’s Federal Board of Reserve, made a number of presentations before committees of the United States Congress. In his testimony, as well as in the question and answer session afterward, he explained the reasons for the economic crisis that had gripped Asia since the previous summer. He also outlined a rationale for congressional support for the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) so-called aid packages to Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia. The reasoning in his speeches echoed that expressed in many articles – really editorials and thought pieces – by other economists that appeared in many major newspapers and magazines beginning in October 1997.1 The economic reasoning that Greenspan and other writers used to interpret the first year of Asia’s financial crisis draws on a set of images of how the capitalist world economy works and of how the Asian countries got themselves into such an awful fix.
