Keating is correct in his assertion that the IMF’s nostrums are now treated with scepticism in Asia. But he is more broadly incorrect that China’s vast foreign reserves are a direct ‘but for’ result of IMF failure during the ’97 financial crisis. China would have accumulated those reserves regardless of how the IMF fared — most Chinese are culturally predisposed to saving for a rainy day anyway, and China is politically disinclined to go cap in hand to foreigners asking for a bailout, especially when an IMF loan almost always comes with strings attached.

IMF intervention, like any foreign intervention in Chinese affairs, is always a politically bitter pill to swallow. For one thing, it would gravely undermine the CCP’s political competence, and the Chinese saw the consequences of such an undermining when Suharto was deposed.

The IMF’s abject performance during the Asian Finance Crisis merely confirmed Chinese prudentialism — but it didn’t cause it.

As for whether China’s foreign reserve holdings and trade imbalances significantly “contributed to the global financial crisis,” that point is a specious one. China may have contributed to the inflow of liquidity and easy capital, but that hardly justifies the profligate spending and unsafe loan instruments underwritten by reckless banks and backed up by worthless credit-rating agencies in the West. Just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean one should be imprudent. Excess liquidity may have set the conditions, but it isn’t a fundamental evil, and by itself can’t be the cause of the current crisis.