Comment

A few prescient people – too few of them economists – are entitled to say of the current economic crisis, “I told you so.” One is Ian Macfarlane, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, who warned in October 1998, at an economic summit in Singapore, that “more and more people are asking whether the international financial system as it has operated for most of the 1990s is basically unstable. By now, I think the majority of observers have come to the conclusion that it is.”