One man sat hunched over the papers that the other had flown in from Washington to watch him sign. The photographs made clear who was in charge: not the strongman who had ruled Indonesia for three decades, but the cross-armed technocrat who looked down as President Suharto inked a bailout agreement that he had seemed to reject a week earlier.
The Greeks’ hostility towards the international institutions that are their country’s chief creditors reminds many Asians of how they felt in 1997-98, when the International Monetary Fund demanded austerity and reforms in countries battered by economic crisis. Such demands are bound to cause strain; if you really dislike austerity, do not borrow from the IMF. When Malaysia declined to do so in 1998, its government was free to spend all the money it could raise.
Greece, which is already in hock to the IMF to the tune of €32bn, no longer has that option. Its situation is closer to Indonesia’s in 1998, when the fund began to suspect that Suharto no longer intended to abide by the plan he had agreed the previous year. It was then that the IMF’s managing director travelled to Jakarta to extract a public commitment to a revised deal.