Since it is not present, they assume there must be some ulterior motive that has been hidden and therefore seize on the GST. I have said on a number of occasions and will say so again today - monetary policy was not tightened because of the GST.
And, in both of these cases, returning to functioning markets required significant central bank interventions. In essence, what these stresses demonstrated was insufficient resilience in segments of the financial system, or – put differently – insufficient private self-insurance ex ante. And the eventual outcome was a need for public interventions ex post. This is not an optimal outcome from a public policy perspective.