How Greenspan's Age of Turbulence is getting Asia down

A year ago, The Age of Turbulence was just a book by Alan Greenspan. Now, the words are being employed to explain Asia's plight in a world the former Federal Reserve chairman helped create.

References to Greenspan's book came up in recent meetings in Hong Kong, Manila, Singapore and Tokyo. Yet Asia's situation is more amply summed up in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, a study of capitalism's disasters. It highlights what may be Greenspan's most important Asia-related observation, one made in December 1997. "The current crisis is likely to accelerate the dismantling in many Asian countries of the remnants of a system with large elements of government-directed investment, in which finance played a key role in carrying out the state's objectives," Greenspan told the Economic Club of New York.

Greenspan added that Asia's crisis was a "very dramatic event towards a consensus of the type of market system which we have in this country." In other words, the destruction of Asia's managed economy was actually a process of creating a new American-style one - birth pangs of a new region.