beyond the horizons of global capital. These areas still offer opportunities for domestic capital.
Business is about taking risks to make a profit. Equally, managing a country like a business is about taking risks to accelerate growth. In his rise as a businessman, Thaksin claimed he loved taking large risks. Most business risks are about debt. The same is true of the risks of Thaksinomics, which involves three kinds of debt risk.
The first is household debt. Thailand was formerly a saving society. The rate of saving (GDS) was in the range of 30 to 40 percent, among the highest in the world and adequate to cover the investment needed for growth. The Thaksin government has encouraged people not to save but to consume, and to go into debt to consume. Household debt has roughly quadrupled. In international terms, the level of such debt is not spectacular. Thailand's level of household debt (measured in proportion to disposable income) is less than two-thirds that of Korea where a similar debt strategy prompted a minor bubble crisis in 2002 (BP, 21 January 2004). But it is larger than Thailand has experienced in the past, and thus difficult to predict what level is critical. The accumulation of household debt has primarily been incentivized by interest rates lower than anything in living memory. Such rates are a legacy of the crisis and the generally low rates prevailing in an over-liquid world. This situation will not last forever, and indeed is likely to change very fast in the near future. In its own way, this new form of debt is no more "hedged" than the corporate dollar loans that underlay the severity of the 1997 crisis. Thaksin shrugs off this risk by reference to his own history as a debtor. But not every corporate risk taker becomes a dollar billionaire because there are not enough oligopolies to go around.
The second debt risk comes from the large role of the government as the allocator of business credit. Countries that have made a success of directing credit in line with policy goals have had systems that ensure the recipients of such credit (and other governmentgranted benefits) deliver high levels of performance. There is no sign such systems are in place, or contemplated, in Thaksinomics.