Foreign investors who fled Asia like moviegoers from a burning theater are returning, poking around for hidden bargains amid the embers. But the recovery may have come too fast. Moreover, the pain that is invisible on traders' screens, but striking in the villages where unemployment and misery still lurk, will not ease any time soon. Bad loans and bad habits still plague financial institutions from Korea to Indonesia. The truth is that many of the reforms are not proceeding.
Old habits die hard.
So far, Mr. Harmon has proved singularly unpersuasive, perhaps because the man who owes him, Aburizal Bakrie, has also emerged as one of Mr. Habibie's staunchest supporters. Mr. Bakrie did not respond to several requests for an interview. In the place where the crisis began, Thailand, the man responsible for overhauling the battered financial system, Amaret Sila-on, rarely misses an opportunity to warn that less has changed than meets the eye. Yes, he says, Thailand has finally created a bankruptcy court, after two years of foot-dragging by politicians who also head some of the country's biggest insolvent companies. But cronyism lives, he warns, as does the system that heedlessly lent money to the politically powerful.