Tim Geithner a clusterfuck for a decade

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating is SCATHING in his denouncing; Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s 1997-98 performance during the Asian monetary crisis, while he was at the International Monetary Fund, to show that. He says he and other IMF officials are the reason the economies of South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia tanked — or, to be precise, the IMF in linkage with private-sector investors — and NOT the governments of those countries.

It was so bad, Keating says, that’s why China still doesn’t trust the IMF a decade later, and why it’s hoarded so much money. He says it’s why renminbi conversion remains off the table.

How bad?

“Soeharto’s government (in Indonesia) delivered 21 years of 7 per cent compound growth. It takes a gigantic fool to mess that up. But the IMF messed it up. The end result was the biggest fall in GDP in the 20th century. That dubious distinction went to Indonesia. And, of course, Soeharto lost power.”

That’s how bad.

That all sheds more light on the new Wall Street Journal story on whom Geithner might be sheltering by refusing to name AIG bailout beneficiaries. In other words, Geithern has a decade’s worth of experience in sheltering private bad investors.