 Minister of Strategy and Finance |
Staff Reporter
The South Korean finance minister gave prickly advice to the chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that he should not repeat his predecessor’s mishandling of the Asian financial crisis that occurred 12 years ago.
Strategy and Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun met with IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and other officials during his visit to Washington last weekend. He reminded the French of how Koreans still talk about the indiscretion of Michel Camdessus, who was in charge of the global bailout fund during the crisis, an official who was at the meeting said on Monday.
“It was a barbed joke, but without any personal feeling,” the official told The Korea Times. ``The minister was saying that the IMF has had an image problem in Korea because of its actions taken during the Asian crisis, and he advised that it should try to improve the image by more actively listening to the voices of emerging nations.’’
Strauss-Kahn replied only with a polite smile, he said.
The conversation was first reported by Yonhap News Agency after it interviewed the minister in Washington.
``When we received the IMF bailout fund, we were forced to take extreme belt-tightening measures, which forced many companies to close down. The IMF later acknowledged its mistake and eased such measures, helping us regain liquidity in our economy,’’ Yonhap’s English service quoted Yoon as saying. ``But in the process, people got this stigma, (that it would be) horrifying to borrow money from the IMF.’’
But a report from Yonhap’s Korean-language service suggested that the minister had expressed harsher comments about the history of the organization. According to it, Yoon advised the IMF to ``repent’’ its wrongdoings. But the ministry official who accompanied Yoon at the meeting said the wording of the Korean report may disillusion international readers, and denied the presence of any cold feelings between the IMF and the Korean delegation.
Nevertheless, the report was published on a number of Internet news Web sites in Korea on Monday, with many citizens leaving comments.
The Asian crisis has left a deep scar on the mentality of South Koreans. From the summer of 1997, the stock market crashed and the won’s value against the dollar plummeted. Several business groups went bankrupt and the jobless rate soared. The country had to rely on the bailout fund from the IMF, which was cynically referred to an acronym of ``I’m Fired’’ by the local media.
In return for the emergency fund, the IMF asked the government to adopt tough reforms, as well as tight fiscal and monetary policies and to liberalize their financial sectors.
Such measures were contradictory to the stimulus packages being employed globally in the recent crisis and have been roundly criticized for exacerbating the economic conditions of many Asian countries, including Korea. Camdessus, the former IMF managing director, has been blamed by economists for misleading his organization, though some defend that without his swift actions things could have become worse.
Yoon’s remarks in Washington show that times have changed and Korea no longer needs to carry the IMF trauma, the official said. ``We (South Korea and the IMF) are now on an equal platform, and we have to cooperate more closely in the future,’’ he said.
