steveaz: And just why is the nineties Asian bailout getting the memory-hole treatment? Is it possible Bill Clinton sold-out the U.S.’s financial sector to assist our Asian economic competitors – with out a promise from them to repay our favor in kind?

My take – and it’s just an opinion – is that the Stiglitz critique of IMF monetary policies provides the most rational and comprehensive explanation for the 1997 Asian Crisis that devalued currencies, stock markets, and assets in places like Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. My take is furthermore, that staff, at the level of international institutions, such as UN and its many agencies, World Bank, and IMF, was (is?) – not to put too fine a point on it – technically substandard and too often corrupt – all business suit and no business, to paraphrase the cowboy version. The inadequate level of technical performance coupled with what appears to be a thriving commerce in corrupt dispersal of humanitarian and other aide monies feeds directly into my suspicions that international organizations have neither the intellectual capital not the institutional framework to function as anything other than black market conduits for huge transfers of money into numbered bank accounts.

Human nature being what it is and always has been since written history.

I don’t think the current issues can be correlated with political ideology or particular presidents, but I am convinced that Congress is the primary culprit, regardless of party control. Vote against your local incumbent.

I also have (some) faith in (some of the) world’s financial institutions and the people who run them. It is to nobody’s advantage that the USA economy tank. I don’t care what outlier scenario emerges from the highly imaginative. That’s lose-lose. As to “obligation”, I would expect that negotiators play that as a card but not the whole hand.

News runs on hype, but I have heard this series of busts and failures described as a once in a lifetime occurrence, which, given an adult lifetime, makes it a 50-yr event or so in terms of risk analysis. That’s not peanuts.