Across East and Southeast Asia, the response to the 2008 crisis set down a historical marker. Against the backdrop of their humiliating reliance on the IMF and the Clinton administration in the 1997 crisis, countries like Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea had reached a new level of autonomy. No more than in China or in the West was this merely a matter of technocratic competence, though they had plenty of that. Major stimulus efforts were political through and through. But whatever the local interests that mobilized in each case, the policy responses of the Asian emerging markets were
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