They point to lessons on building up reserves for insurance, managing debt levels, setting up prudential standards and cleaning up bank balance sheets – all lessons astutely learned from and implemented by the Asian economies since 1997 Crisis. However, in the same breath, the IMF admitted that an Asian recovery may not occur without a recovery in the US.
The recent events have indeed debunked the myth of Asia decoupling from the U.S. I see a three-fold hope in that irony. First, the strong and aggressive policy actions by the US could move it closer to a recovery than without such action. Second, individual economies outside of the US are also doing their part to shore up confidence in their own economies.