Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin picked a good time to resign. As a
senior White House official said, Rubin "made his fortune selling at the top of the
market." Perhaps that’s why the Dow initially dropped 200 points on the news: some of
Rubin’s colleagues on Wall Street may have sensed that he was getting out while the
getting was good.
The market subsequently rebounded, partly because Deputy Treasury
Secretary Lawrence Summers, Rubin’s replacement, was seen as continuing the policies of
his predecessor.
But continuity is the last thing we need. Rubin’s admirers have
noted that the stock market has been booming lately, money is flowing back into
"emerging markets," and the threat of "contagion" in the international
financial system– from Russia’s default on foreign debt, for example– has receded.
But the disasters that Robert Rubin helped create in his four years
at Treasury are still festering. There are tens of millions of newly impoverished people
in Indonesia, South Korea, and the other Asian countries that were dragged into the swamp
last year. The Russian economy, cut in half after seven years of Western management, is
again contracting– spurring a seemingly endless political crisis. Brazil’s economy is
shrinking even faster, thanks to a Treasury-organized bail-out of foreign investors that
began last November. It is only a matter of time before more of Treasury’s chickens,
dispersed throughout the globe, come home to roost.
It is no exaggeration to say that the U.S. Treasury Department is
the primary culprit in this continuing economic turmoil. It was at their urging that the
Asian countries opened their economies to the massive foreign borrowing that pushed their
financial systems to the precipice. For example, an internal Treasury Department
memorandum of June 29, 1996 listed "priority areas where Treasury is seeking further
liberalization" in South Korea. These included the short-term foreign borrowing by
Korean companies that made their economy– as well as others– especially vulnerable to a
sudden reversal of capital flows.
Then they turned the financial crisis into a regional depression, by
forcing "austerity" policies on the injured economies of the region: high
interest rates, tax increases, and budget cuts.
To understand how Treasury can do so much damage to the world, it is
necessary to look at the mechanisms of their power. The most important is the
International Monetary Fund. Although it is ostensibly an organization of 182 member
countries, in practice it is controlled by the U.S. Treasury department. Furthermore, they
have set up the system so that a government that does not agree to the IMF’s conditions
for lending will be denied credit from the World Bank, other multilateral lending
agencies, and often private sources as well. So it is very difficult, and for many
governments it is practically suicidal, to refuse the IMF’s– and therefore Treasury’s–
demands.
Rubin went to great lengths to preserve this system of absolute
power. In August of 1997 Japan proposed a $100 billion fund to stabilize the region’s
currencies. Lawrence Summers was assigned to kill the plan, and accomplished his mission.
Maintaining the Treasury’s control over the conditions of any bailout was more important
than preventing the region’s descent into economic chaos, which was still possible at that
time.
Rubin also distinguished himself by fighting to keep the Clinton
administration from increasing spending on programs for the poor. But his largesse knew no
limits when it came to bailing out his Wall Street friends when their loans went sour in
Mexico or South Korea. In 1995 during the Mexican peso crisis, he ran into Congressional
opposition– after all, most people think that if you make risky loans and get high
interest rates for your gamble, the government shouldn’t bail you out when you lose. So he
did an end run around Congress and grabbed $12 billion from a special Treasury fund that
is supposed to be used only for stabilizing the dollar.
Over the last two years there has been a major shift in thinking
among economists with regard to unregulated financial flows across international
boundaries. Many of the nation’s most prominent economists– Joseph Stiglitz at the World
Bank, Columbia’s Jagdish Bhagwati, Paul Krugman at M.I.T., and Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs
among them– have argued that international financial liberalization has gone too far.
But the interests of U.S. financial firms in expanding their
overseas operations have prevailed in the policy arena. The "Wall Street-Treasury
Complex" marches onward, unfazed by the still- smoldering wreckage from their most
recent ventures.
Summers’ appointment is a sure sign that the interests of traders,
speculators, and multinational banks will remain supreme. At least until the next round of
financial disasters triggers some re- thinking.
Mark Weisbrot is Research Director at the Preamble Center, in Washington, D.C.
Name: Mark Weisbrot
E-mail: [email protected]
Preamble Center
1737 21st Street NW
Washington DC 20009 (202) 265-3263
