Grimes Interviewed on the Next Asian Financial Crisis
William Grimes, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed on the potential for a financial crisis in Asia, and the impact a currency crisis in East Asia could have.
Grimes was interviewed for a September 18, 2017 article in the South China Morning Post entitled “America First and China vs. Japan: Is Asia Ready for Next Financial Crisis?”
From the text of the article:
“My big concern at the moment is: what would happen if there were a currency crisis in East Asia that required IMF involvement,” said Professor William Grimes of Boston University, an expert in regional finance.
In particular, Grimes noted Trump’s team at the Treasury for International Affairs was led by David Malpass and Nicholas Lerrick, both of whom are sceptical of IMF bailouts.
“Together with the very narrow Trumpian vision of ‘America First’, I can easily imagine a sensible IMF-led plan being vetoed by the US,” Grimes said.
That scenario, as Grimes points out, would leave China, Japan, and other countries in the region very much on their own.
Grimes, who has taught at Boston University since 1996, is a leading scholar of East Asian financial regionalism. His 2008 book Currency and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Politics of Financial Regionalism won the 2010 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize and received Honorable Mention for the 2009 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award. More recently, in conjunction with the Pardee School’s Global Economic Governance Initiative, he led a research project for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to develop a guide to best practices for regional liquidity arrangements.