Two weeks ago, the Sydney Morning Herald had a devastating expose of how Treasury Secretary Geithner destroyed the Indonesian economy back in the 1990s. At the time, “he was Uncle Sam’s golden-boy emissary sent into the stormy centre of what was then the world’s worst financial crisis [the Asian crisis].”

The newspaper reports that:

In a speech to a closed gathering at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Thursday, Paul Keating [Australia Former Prime Minister] 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.

Read this story here.