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As Indonesia's GDP fell and unemployment surged, the IMF stepped in to mandate austerity by abolishing subsidies on food and kerosene. The riots that followed 'tore the country's social fabric' apart. The capitalist classes, mainly ethnic Chinese, were widely blamed for the debacle. While the wealthiest Chinese business elite decamped to Singapore, a wave of revenge killings and attacks on property engulfed the rest of the Chinese minority...The standard IMF/US Treasury explanation for the crisis was too much state intervention and corrupt relationships between state and business ('crony capitalism'). Further neoliberalization was the answer. The Treasury and the IMF acted accordingly, with disastrous consequences. The alternative view of the crisis was the impetuous financial deregulation and the failure to construct adequate regulatory controls over unruly and speculative portfolio investments lay at the heart of the problem. The evidence for the latter view is substantial: those countries that had not liberated capital markets--Singapore, Taiwan, and China--were far less affected than those countries, such as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Phillippines, that had. Furthermore, the one country that ignored the IMF and imposed capital controls--Malaysia--recovered faster. After South Korea likewise rejected IMF advice on industrial and financial restructuring, it also staged a faster recovery. (Harvey 96-97)
But who would ever think the World Bank or the IMF could be instruments of repression? </snark>
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