ABSTRACT
The East Asian crisis will be recorded as one of the least foreseen events. However, once the crisis had unfolded, a debate developed along the same lines that we have experienced with the previous crises in other regions of the world. Economists once again started to discuss the need for a 'new Global Financial Architecture', the relation between interest rates and exchange rates and their impact on devaluation. Marxists and structuralists verified the predictability of their theories on the economic cycles (the Marxian's, the Schumpeterian's or the Kondratieff's ones), while Institutionalists regained their strength by focusing on institutional and market transparency and on crony capitalism. Once again a debate blew up within the international institutions on delays, mistakes or misunderstanding that had made the crisis and their bad forecasting and policy interventions possible. This debate has also included a critique of wrong policies imposed on countries by the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) against the warnings launched by governments and 'radical' writers. Paradoxically, even the 'authors' of these policies - the economic and political forces governing the process of globalization - have blamed the 'actors',1 i.e., the leaders of the international institutions which have implemented policies functional to the interest of the Triad. The irony of history is that through this old-style 'organized mystification' (to change everything to leave things as they are at the present), the leaders of the old world financial system will become the leaders of the 'new Global Financial Architecture'. Perhaps some new Nobel Prizes in Economics may be awarded to scholars in charge of this readjustment of the neoliberal strategy.
