The large majority of citizens, who had nothing to do with the errors leading up to the crisis, were made destitute because their small incomes and savings declined in value. Large parts of the growing middle class in the worst hit countries in South East Asia were wiped out. Conditional support was often provided with tough requirements of economic policy restraint. A tight fiscal policy would create scope for financing restructuring in the banking sector. Stringent monetary policy would counteract an overly severe depreciation of the currency. This can be criticised with hindsight, as in South East Asia the countries often did not have problematic deficits in public finances or high inflation rates. The IMF has admitted since that the restraint was too great, as they did not realise the extent of the financial crisis. The task for the BIS, the IMF, the World Bank and other international organisations should be to continue the work on finding rules and methods, both to protect innocent people from ruination and to put the risk for bad investments on those making the investments. Work on this is underway in the organisations I mentioned earlier. It involves capital adequacy rules for banks, but also reporting,  4  BIS Review 9/2002  auditing, financial supervision, bankruptcy legislation and transparency in conducting monetary and fiscal policy.
Villy Bergström: Does globalisation have anything to do with the closing down of the ATM? Speech by Mr Villy Bergström, Deputy Governor of Sveriges Riksbank, held before “pappers avd 111” (a local union of the Swedish Paper Workers Union), Grycksbo, 11 February 2002. *  *  *  Globalisation is an unclear concept and I think that the chairman of Pappers avdelning 111, Lars Göran Johansson, who invited me to this meeting, gave me an interesting task when he formulated the heading for my talk. He phrased it as a question; "Does globalisation have anything to do with the closing down of the ATM?" I shall return to what I believe that people in general mean by globalisation and I shall also return to Lars Göran's question at the end, but allow me to begin by saying that Sweden has undergone a globalisation process for more than 100 years, in the sense that our country has been exposed to competition. A large proportion of our total production has been aimed for a long time towards the export market, while we have imported goods and received foreign investment capital. Foreign trade comprised approximately 20 per cent of the Swedish economy from the 1870s until the end of World War II. That is to say, import and export each comprised 20 per cent of the total production here in Sweden. An increase in foreign trade began during the post-war period, and export and import now comprise approximately 40 per cent each of our total production.