The Sydney Morning Herald has an absolutely devastating expose of Treasury Secretary Geithner as the former Australian Prime Minister during the Asian financial crisis of the 1990's relates how Geithner's actions destroyed the Indonesian economy - a feat thought impossible at the time:In a speech to a closed gathering at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Thursday, Paul Keating gave a starkly different account of Geithner's record in handling the Asian crisis: "Tim Geithner was the Treasury line officer who wrote the IMF [International Monetary Fund] program for Indonesia in 1997-98, which was to apply current account solutions to a capital account crisis."In other words, Geithner fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. And his misdiagnosis led to a dreadfully wrong prescription.Geithner thought Asia's problem was the same as the ones that had shattered Latin America in the 1980s and Mexico in 1994, a classic current account crisis. In this kind of crisis, the central cause is...(Read Full Post)