It was a year ago that financial markets launched their first serious attack on Thailand's baht currency, an event which had unforeseen but dramatic repercussions across Asia.

The situation has deteriorated in Indonesia, the country hardest hit by the financial turmoil. Hundreds died in the chaos during anti-government demonstrations. Peace has been restored for now, but the economic crisis remains.

The deaths are just the latest in a long line of bad news for the region, and perceptions about what is happening in Asia are changing again. This time for the worse.

"People were too optimistic about the region turning the corner and the worst being over," John Noonan, head of proprietary trading at National Australia Bank in Singapore, told Reuters Television. "The region is showing some signs of cracking again."

Some 18 million Indonesians will be forced into poverty by the nation's ravaging economic crisis and they will remain desperately poor for years to come, economists said.

World Bank Chief James Wolfensohn said that the number of Indonesians living on one U.S. dollar per day would almost double to 20 percent of the population of 200 million people from 11 percent because of the crisis.

Much of this poverty will be concentrated in urban areas, where unemployment has already doubled to about 8.7 million people since the crisis began last year.

Japan is also a major, and growing, economic concern. There are increasing worries the huge Japanese economy will not be able to lead the rest of the region into recovery.

Six weeks ago, the seamstresses at the PAR Garment Factory on the outskirts of Bangkok arrived at work to find a sign on the gate that read: "The company is closed."

Uniformed guards told them to go home. The factory was bankrupt. But many of the workers--migrants from poor rural areas--had nowhere else to go. So they stayed, sleeping on straw mats on the sidewalk by the factory gate, waiting for some stroke of good fortune they know will never come.

"We can't find work at another factory because other factories are closing too," said Song Siwang, a 37-year-old seamstress. "And we don't want to go back to our home villages because there is no work there either." Poor workers throughout Southeast Asia in growing numbers are expected to lose their jobs in the months to come, some of the last to benefit and the first to suffer in the region's economic rise and fall.

South Korea is in serious trouble, and personal dreams have been shattered. Thus the hiking trails at Pukhansan National Park have become a sort of hide-out for newly unemployed businessmen. Too embarrassed to tell their families the bad news, the men continue to leave their homes each morning dressed in work attire but head for the mountains instead of their offices.

The human toll can also be measured by the increase in suicide and crimes such as theft, burglary and kidnapping, according to local newspapers. By one count, business executives are killing themselves at a rate of one a day.

These harsh new times are being dubbed the "IMF era," just as the rising lawlessness is sometimes characterized as "IMF crime"--reflecting the fact that some Koreans blame it not on their own national policies but on the reforms demanded by the IMF to address the country's woes.

(New York Times News Service)
Korea is as proud and prickly a nation as any on the globe. For an A-plus student like South Korea to be sent to the corner with what feels like a dunce cap is a torture more psychological than economic, and the heartbreak on the frosty streets of Seoul is almost palpable.

This sense of humiliation may have far-reaching consequences. There is a deep anger in South Korea at Washington because of the conditions imposed as part of the bail-out.

In most of Asia the anxiety has been focused on personal fears about unemployment, tumbling stock prices, lost savings. In South Korea, the sense of injury encompasses all that but is centered on something broader and vaguer--the sting to national honor, the fear that Korea itself has lost face before the world.

HAVANA -- Cuban President Fidel Castro has warned his parliament that "the world is on the brink of a crisis worse than that of 1929 caused by unscrupulous speculative practices and globalization."

Castro denounced "the financial practices of big speculators who, without producing any commodities, take advantage of the economic weaknesses of less developed nations to earn million of dollars in financial or stock market operations, leading to the virtual bankruptcy of those countries. They are like wolves, attacking the weakest animals of the pack."

As Korea's plunging currency and stock prices kill its economy, 45 companies a day go belly up. But to some, that is not bad news. "Korean Companies are Looking Ripe to Foreign Buyers: Selling Spree Expected," ran the headline in The New York Times. The vulture capitalists will be feeding on Korea's carcass a long, long time.

Transnational corporations are poised to swoop in and snap up Korea's properties as in a game of Monopoly. Says Sen. Robert Toricelli: "The country is about to see a fire sale of some of its major assets." And when the U.S. corporations buy up these companies at bankruptcy-sale prices, they will find that Korea's currency collapse means that the dollar wages of Korean workers are now only half what they were in July. Isn't the Global Economy wonderful?

LONDON -- U.S. financier George Soros said the international financial system was suffering a systemic breakdown thanks to the crisis in Southeast Asia.

Writing in Britain's Financial Times newspaper, the multi-billionaire said the financial community should grab the opportunity to set up a new global authority to guarantee international loans for a fee.

"What started out as a minor imbalance (in Asia) has become a much bigger one that threatens to engulf not only international credit but also international trade. We are on the verge of worldwide deflation."