Some stability has now been restored in the financial markets. The attention of the world debate has now been shifted, firstly, to what is needed and prudent to re-stimulate the world economy and, secondly, what structural adjustments to national and global economic structures will be necessary to avoid a recurrence of the East Asian crisis and its contagion effects in future.
I myself lived through a period during which all the institutions with high leverage, by the end of the 1980s, were managing capital worth something in the region of USD 100 billion. 17 years later, in 2007, the figure was USD 3,000 billion!