大学英语专业大二泛读练习.doc

Passage 1 The Asian Financial Crisis In a breath-taking turn of events, Asias economies have gone from miracle to meltdown in a matter of weeks. Many forecasters who recently predicted GDP growth of 6% in South Korea and Southeast Asia for 1998 are suddenly projecting zero or even negative growth. In the often short-sighted world of international finance, a new conventional wisdom is quickly forming: that inept policy-making is dragging down Asian economies, and that only the tough austerity medicine of the International Monetary Fund, plus a good stiff recession, will bring the regions economies back to track. In recent years, foreign and domestic investors in East Asia got a touch of what U.S. Federal Re-serve Chairman Alan Greenspan has famously termed irrational exuberance. Spurred by years of high economic growth in Asia, these investors poured billions of dollars of loans into the region, financing many worthwhile investments but also an unsustainable real estate boom. This over-investment need not have caused a crisis. A healthy reaction would have involved a gradual cutback in foreign lending, a gradual weakening of Asias overvalued currencies and gradual shift of investments from over-inflated property sectors back to long-term export-oriented projects. Most short-term booms are brought down to earth without extreme crisis, and such an adjustment was the most likely scenario until the summer in 1997. In the event, Asia experienced a financial meltdown. A gradual withdrawal of funds from Thailand suddenly became a stampede. Thailands government dallied in responding to the overheating long after it had become apparent, and as a result squandered Thailands foreign exchange reserves in a misguided attempt to defend the overvalued baht. The stampede came when foreign creditors realized that Thailand had more short-term foreign debts than the remaining short-term foreign reserve