ABSTRACT
IMF pronouncements made during the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis and those addressing its ‘aftermath’ employ an intriguing and revelatory rhetoric, one that seeks to reconfigure and at times to obliterate the meanings of the crisis within a discourse of international economic development. The language the IMF uses to tell its story of Thai and Malaysian collapse displays powerful and recurrent tropes of capitalist discipline and triumph, tropes that appear to erase the deleterious consequences of IMF actions on the populations most affected by its policies.
