Phuket, Thailand - Finance ministers from South-east and
East Asia met Sunday on the Thai tourist island of Phuket to try to
come up with joint measures to tackle the effects on the region of
the global economic slide.
Although institutional investors in East Asia generally stayed
away from the kind of financial instruments that led to the current
economic crisis in the West, the countries of the region have already
experienced dramatic falls in volumes of exports to the West, with
further drops expected.
The main topic of the day's discussions at the Sheraton Resort in
Phuket, 550 kilometres south of Bangkok, is expected to be the
establishment of a regional rescue fund of 80 to 120 billion dollars.
Also likely to be discussed is expansion of the Chiangmai
Initiative of 2000, which paved the way for a slew of bilateral
currency swap agreements between the members of the Association of
South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus their three main Asian economic
partners - China, Japan and South Korea.
The ministers gathered on Phuket are from Thailand - the current
chair of ASEAN - Brunei, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the
Philippines, Vietnam and China, Japan and South Korea.
Japan, whose new minister has only just got his feet under the
desk after is predecessor quit amid accusations that he was drunk in
public, has sent a senior finance ministry official, while Singapore
and Cambodia were unrepresented at the regional meeting.
Malaysian Finance minister Najib Tun Razak caused a minor
diplomatic flurry Saturday when it was discovered that his five
bodyguards had smuggled their automatic weapons into Thailand,
according to a Thai source working with the visiting delegates, who
asked to remain anonymous.
In the interests of regional harmony, however, the incident was
quietly swept under the carpet.
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