以阿根廷为代表的新兴国家市场的货币危机这几周愈演愈烈，阿根廷8月30日把benchmark interest rate从45%提高至60%来defend货币贬值。从4月到现在相对于美元贬值了接近一半。
from Bloomberg –
碰巧，最近在读索罗斯的The Alchemy of Finance（还没有读完），觉得很多dots可以connect起来；international banking也只是近50年的事（1970s是boom的开始）；在这里放一些书中节选（目前读到第五章），international lending相关：
- Flush with funds, they（指banks） became aggressive lenders, and they found plenty of takers. Less developed countries without oil sought to finance their deficits by running up large debts; those with oil embarked on ambitious expansion programs, which they financed by borrowing on the strength of their oil reserves
- It is amazing how little information borrowing countries had to supply in order to obtain loans. Lending banks did not even know how much money the countries in question were borrowing elsewhere.
- Debtor countries preferred to deal with commercial banks rather than go to the International Monetary Fund when they were in balance-of-payments difficulties. Unwittingly, commercial banks took over one of the functions that the Bretton Woods institutions – the IMF and the World Bank – had been designed to fulfill
- In retrospect it is obvious that the borrowers spent the money unwisely. At best they built white elephants like the Itaipu Dam in Brazil; at worst they spent it on armaments or used it to maintain unrealistically high exchange rates as in the “southern cone” countries of Argentina and Chile
- The boom kept the demand for energy growing. The OPEC countries grew richer and less in need of current income, while negative real interest rates made it more attractive to keep oil in the ground than cash in the bank. This provided the setting in which the disruption of Iranian production in 1979 caused a second crisis and a second jump in the price of oil. This time the response was different. Inflation had become a dominant concern
- …
合理的borrowing/lending本是好事，怎么花这些钱，是需要考量的事。
另外，一个responsible lender不应该硬塞大量钱给没有准备好的人／国家。
P.S. 将新开一个关于书的section