Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Sachs

Panic, in Sachs's telling, isn’t a natural disaster; it’s an institutional aftershock. By framing “the runs” as something that “started” only after the IMF “intervened in such a dramatic way,” he flips the usual crisis narrative on its head: the rescuer becomes the accelerant. The word “runs” is doing quiet but heavy work here. It evokes bank runs and investor stampedes, a contagious loss of confidence that spreads less through spreadsheets than through fear. Sachs is arguing that confidence was not merely restored poorly; it was shattered publicly.

“Dramatic” reads like a critique of performance as policy. IMF programs in the Asian Financial Crisis were not just technical packages of conditional lending; they were global spectacles of discipline: austerity, closures, and hard-edged signaling to markets. Sachs implies that the signal markets received was not “stability is coming,” but “things are worse than you thought, and outsiders are now running the show.” That’s how capital flight becomes rational.

Then comes the pivot: “Then the IMF came to Indonesia.” It’s written like the arrival of a storm front, suggesting a sequence, even a kind of inevitability. The subtext is contagion-by-policy: Thailand becomes the template, investors extrapolate, Indonesia gets punished preemptively, and the crisis metastasizes. Sachs’s intent is political as much as economic: to indict a one-size-fits-all crisis playbook and to reclaim agency for national governments, arguing that the IMF’s credibility theater can turn localized fragility into a regional rout.