This week sees yet more regional brainstorming intended to stem financial malaise. Business and government leaders in Kuala Lumpur are already busy with fine-sounding palliative solutions.
Yet, even as Southeast Asia plays at statesmanship, the impression of a defunct ruling elite whistling in the wind is hard to avoid. More than ever, the shots are being called from Washington.
The South Korean bailout must be the fastest such deal negotiated. Only 10 days ago, Seoul refused to admit it had a problem. Now, it is in the arms of the International Monetary Fund.
How the Korean situation developed so quickly will undoubtedly be the subject of investigation. Clearly someone at the international credit rating agencies was asleep at the wheel for a sovereign-debt crisis potentially on the scale of South America in 1982 to suddenly loom.
US Treasury and Federal Reserve officials have pushed the process. Having seen Asian contagion spread to US shores, the prospect of an imported banking crisis was enough to steamroller inevitable complaints from congress of wasted money.
Plans for an Asia-managed rescue fund have been ditched. IMF conditionality seems to have been accepted with barely a whimper, while plans for a regional foreign-exchange stand-by facility seem an irrelevance given the sums of money involved.
So where does this leave the loquacious band of policy-makers intent on cocking a snook at big finance? Thoroughly emasculated, it would seem. Having built political credibility around the totem of economic growth and national self-reliance, many are looking all too mortal.
