In The Quiet Coup Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), says that the current financial crisis resembles on a larger scale the sort of messes that emerging markets get into. He says that if we don’t want things to get worse we need to impose the kind of reforms that the IMF would demand of a small country that came to it for help.

Megan McArdle seems sympathetic to this notion, but in Foreigners + Money = Crisis? she points to claims that the IMF thoroughly botched its handling of the Asian financial crisis of 1998, which like the current crisis had a lot to do with countries being flooded with volitile foreign investment.