and investment banks. This would transfer the exchange-rate risk to the host country as well as give their monetary policy an anti-inflationary anchor. The United States then pressed for financial liberalization and deregulation to allow U.S. banks a growing share of the tigers' burgeoning financial business. The result was a credit, stock market, and property boom in all the countries concerned.

But the tigers' export earnings were not equal to the inflated expectations. Their trade balances moved into deficit; their currency links with the dollar, itself appreciating, became impossible to sustain. When China entered the world system after Clinton's election in 1992, its cheap exports further undermined their trade performance already under pressure as the dollar appreciated against the yen; dollar-priced exports became fiercely uncompetitive. The "hot money" thathad moved into their countries moved out no less quickly under the new rules of capital liberalization, while the barely regulated financial-derivatives markets and hedge funds—another U.S. invention—added to the speculation.

The global consensus, lead by the United States, blamed the calamity not on the operation of the financial markets or the U.S.-inspired policy agenda, but instead on crony capitalism. The same Asian values that had been praised only months earlier as being the secret behind 20 years of economic success were now scorned. Successive IMF adjustment programs, in close coordination with the U.S. Treasury, were designed to stabilize the countries' international position, retaining the capital market liberalization so important to the United States, whatever the consequences for unemployment, output, and social stability. It was a naked exercise in