The IMF Bail out Package
The IMF, in collaboration with other multilateral agencies (World Bank and Asian Development Bank) and the bilateral agencies, provided nearly $112 million in foreign reserves to the central banks of the three crisis-ravaged Asian economies to meet the debt service and repayment needs of foreign creditors (see Table 6).
The IMF bailout strategy aimed to restore confidence amongst foreign creditors by replenishing foreign exchange reserves in the Asian central banks. It was hoped that exchange rates would thereby be stabilised and the outflow of foreign capital reversed. By the end of the first phase in 1997, it was evident that the IMF bailout package had failed to restore market confidence and halt the exodus of capital from Asia-5 economies. A telling indicator of this failure was the downgrading of Asia-5 credit rating to junk bond status by the international credit-rating agencies.
Several explanations have been proffered for the failure of the first phase of the IMF bailout package.
First, the IMF's institutional view that the Asian crisis was triggered by weak macroeconomic fundamentals rather than by self-fulfilling creditor panic was not conducive to confidence-building amongst international investors. Second, the IMF's attempt to implement radical financial-sector and macroeconomic restructuring as a pre-condition for disbursing
the bailout to crisis-torn economies exacerbated the panic. There is ample evidence from past manias and panics that any attempt to carry out drastic structural reforms in the midst of a creditor panic tends to inflame the panic and worsen the crisis. Third, the stringent macroeconomic disciplinary targets such as the achievement of budget surpluses of nearly 1 % of GDP per annum, interest rate hikes, credit crunches and other restrictive policies accelerated the slide
towards recession rather than recovery. Fourth, the closure of unviable banks and financial institutions spawned a liquidity crisis and this prevented exportoriented industries from obtaining working capital and opening letters of credit to facilitate trade and make use of the opportunities created by the massive depreciation. Fifth, the tranched disbursement of the bail out funds subject to strict conditionality and arduous negotiations emasculated the IMF's role as a quasi lender of last resort. Sixth, the linking of longterm structural reform to the short-term need to provide finance represented an unnecessary distraction. The IMF bailout failed to provide the liquidity required to avoid the insolvency of financial institutions and thereby calm creditor panic. After a lapse of ten months, only 20% of the bailout commitments had been disbursed (Table 6).
In the second phase (1998) of the bailout, the IMF drastically revamped its strategy in an attempt to reinstil market confidence. The IMF relaxed its insistence on the achievement of tight fiscal and monetary policy targets to qualify for the bailout. The IMF also spearheaded the negotiations for the rollover of the Korean short-term debts by international creditors by securing an extension of the maturity periods. In the case of Thailand, the IMF negotiated the issuance of government guarantees for liabilities owing to both foreign and domestic creditors by Thai financial institutions. In the case of Indonesia, after much footdragging, the Indonesian government was persuaded by the IMF to sign up orderly workouts for the repayment of its massive stockpile of non-government or corporate debt. These rollovers, government guarantees and orderly workout arrangements on debt repayments avoiding outright default restored a modicum of calm to the highly volatile financial markets of Asia-5 during the middle of 1998. But overall, after one year of financial turmoil resulting from the pursuit of misaligned exchange-rate pegs and reckless short-term borrowing, the Asian economies had taken a severe economic battering as shown by an array of economic indicators (Table 7).
During the year ending in mid-1998 the exchange rates of Asia-5 domestic currencies with the US dollar
had depreciated on average by more than 215%, with the exchange rate in Indonesia plummeting nearly five-fold in just one year. Stock-market prices during this period nose-dived by 72% and short-term interest rates sky-rocketed by more than 167%. The credit ratings of the Asia-5 economies were also downgraded to junk bond status or less than
investment grade. With exchange rates depreciating, asset prices falling and rising interest rates, the Asia- 5 economies, which had had a track record of rapid growth for nearly three decades, were reporting recessions. In the year ending in the first quarter of 1998 GDP on average for Asia-5 fell by 2.2% and the recessionary trends are expected to continue into the next year (Table 7).
The challenge facing the turmoil-ridden Asian economies is how to get on to the pre-crisis potential
growth trajectory. The implementation of