How did the events in these individual Asian countries create a regional problem?
They all fit into a picture. When the markets decide that governments are not going to be able to hold to fixed exchange rates anymore, people are going to attack those rates. It becomes a one-way ticket to making money. So from there you go to Singapore and Hong Kong, which are sitting in the middle of all this. In Singapore, the exchange rate has already moved slightly, but they haven’t suffered a massive attack because it’s a well-managed country with no political issues and a banking system that hasn’t had any of the kinds of excesses that we’ve seen in these other places. In the case of Hong Kong, a lot of people took their money out of Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia and put it into Hong Kong, which was viewed as an island of stability. But when the contagion spread to Hong Kong, people started pulling their money out of Hong Kong too. How much has the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong last July affected Hong Kong’s ability to play the role as an island of stability amid the financi
