Dont Repeat Our Mistakes, Says Thai Deputy Pm

Thailands deputy Prime Minis-ter, Supachai Panitchpakdi, yesterday lashed out at the worlds leading credit rating agencies, Moodys and Standard and Poors, for overreacting to the South-east Asian crisis and called for Asian countries to join hands to set up their own rating agency.

However, Panitchpakdi ack-nowledged that Thailand and other Asian tigers had made mistakes and urged India to learn from them. Avoid repeating the mistakes we made. We were expanding our economies when we should have been consolidating, and we werent forewarned of the dangers that lay ahead, Panitchpakdi said at a special plenary at the partnership summit organised by the CII in Chennai.

He asserted that the Asian crisis was not one of over-consumption but of over-investment and excessive reliance on external sources of borrowing as well as misallocation of short-term resources by the private sector in the region.

India, he said, must put in place a watertight supervisory mechanism before liberalising its financial sectors, as the speed of globalisation was a crucial factor in sustaining reforms. India needed to liberalise and globalise, as it needed investments in excess of its domestic savings, particularly to improve its infrastructure facilities, Panitchpakdi said.