Today's date:
 
Spring 1998


Mr. Yen Looks at the Asian Crisis

Eisuke Sakakibara, Japan's powerful deputy minister of finance, is known as "Mr. Yen" because his public remarks can often result in immediate fluctuations in the value of the Japanese currency.

Tokyo - The Asian economy is not melting down. If anything, we are witnessing the end of euphoria and the bursting of the Asian bubble. Further, this is not an Asian crisis, but a crisis of global capitalism involving both borrowers and lenders, including Japanese creditors. And it has mostly been a private-sector crisis, not a government crisis. In fact, management of the public sector has been relatively healthy.

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