I finished reading Paul Krugman's Return of Depression Economics a few weeks back. It describes the causes behind the currency crisises and the impacts of the resulting meltdowns that effected most of the South East Asian and Latin American economies in the waning years of the nineties.

At that time, I was not terribly interested in international political economy. Outside of a perception culled from cursory readings of BusinessWeek et al that the 'paper tigers' in South East Asia are having a tough time and it is good for them in the long run, I did not really have a clue.

Krugman's book provides a lucid, witty and frightening perspective of the global economy at that juncture and surprisingly for a free-trader, holds IMF responsible for much of what went wrong. All of us in India and China who are currently going ga ga over our own emerging economies should read up on the emerging economy meltdown of the nineties. It is scary how fragile our national prosperity really is and how little it takes for it to go wrong.