When near-developed Korea and near-dissolved Indonesia suffer the same fickle fate, how does a nation defend itself against the confidence game? Float a failing currency, and bear the bankruptcies with a smile, or defend it with soaring interest rates that guarantee a recession of a different color? (In this world the IMF, the lender of last resort, gets cast as the first hamhanded villain when its tough-love policies turn out to be merely tough.) Or perhaps a third way -- in Malaysia, the shrill Mahathir cries Soros and slams shut his nation's barn doors to find the cash cows have already left. In China, the capitalist Communists crouch behind their new Great Wall, an inconvertible yuan, only to struggle with an economic rot that cannot stay hidden for long.

Just a decade ago, it was Japan that was indomitable, its lockstep alliance between government and industry the perfect armor for a take-no-prisoners modernity. Now those Asian values - or is it something else? - have the rising sun sunk in a liquidity trap. Could what has happened to Japan happen to the mighty US, only fifteen years removed from its own decade of decay? Why not? After the Great Depression, the last time the world shook this way, we thought all the lessons were learned. After Mexico's peso crisis of 1995, the IMF was supposed to have perfected its rescue regimen. After this Asian crisis - so inadequate a name for the flu that flitted from Bangkok to Brazil and back again - the devastation was supposed to have wrought its own vaccine. Western policymen imagined it writ like an Aesop moral: transparent accounting practices, bank bailouts (remember America's own Reagan-era reckoning?), a new sensibleness appropriate to a new economic age. Think again. The cronies, the chaebols, the vicious circles of vindictive speculation - they all remain. No one is immune. And now we wait for it all to happen again -- but where will it start this time?