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Financial Crisis in Indonesia

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Submitted By aisyahzahar
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Domino’s Effect. When one collapsed, others follows too. That is what happened to Indonesia and other Asian countries like Philippine, Malaysia and Singapore. It started in Thailand when Thai government failed to defend the bath and end up raising huge debt. After that other Asian countries also started to face financial crisis due collapse of confidence in the ability to maintain their fixed exchange rates while continuing to allow the free movement of foreign finance capital at a time of increasing current account deficits. At first, Indonesia seems like not affected with what happened in Thailand but then, there are strong pressure on the Indonesian Rupiah and in August 1997, Indonesia Rupiah was set to float freely and it began depreciating significantly. At 1 January 1998, rupiah’s nominal value was only 30 percent of what it had been in June 1997 and it keeps getting worse day by day. Panic selling of rupiah for dollars by Indonesian companies with dollar-denominated debt showed that private foreign debt was far higher than previously thought. Even worse, the fact that Bank Indonesia was unaware of the extent of the debt showed its poor capacity to oversee and regulate Indonesia's financial markets. As Indonesia government unable to cope with the crisis, they decided to ask for financial help from International Monetary Fund (IMF) in October 1997. The first help from IMF were amounted total USD43 million to restore Indonesia market with some conditions which is included a number of conditions aimed at restructuring the country's financial sector and deregulating the economy, cutting government expenditure and subsidies, reforming trade and industry policy and improving transparency in relations between business and government, closure of 16 privately-owned banks and ask the Central Bank (Bank Indonesia) to raise up the interest rates but it turned out to be a failure when there were interruption of political crisis such as restrict the banks' ability to lend and forcing the Central Bank to provide large credits to the remaining banks to avert a complete banking crisis. This all due to the patronage system lead by Suharto. Then, here comes another financial help from IMF as the Rupiah value lost half of its value in just 5 days. This time, the agreement comes with more detailed program designed to prevent an economic contraction. The agreement specifically mentioned the elimination of support to the aircraft industry and the National Car project, the restriction of the BULOG (Indonesia's food distribution agency) trade monopoly on the import of rice, deregulation of domestic trade in all agricultural products, including cloves (a major ingredient of Indonesian cigarettes) and the dissolution of cartels in the important cement, paper and plywood industries. The Government also agreed to phase out energy subsidies by gradually increasing the price of fuel and electricity, but limiting price increases for kerosene used for domestic cooking. But, once again, Suharto reluctant to implement the reform program faithfully and that makes IMF realize that they need to restart private capital flows to Indonesia as a way to overcome the crisis and the patronage system need to be broken down. After the second agreement, the third agreement was signed in early 1998. However, the economy does not show any good improvement. In the third agreement, IMF granted large food subsidies for low-income household and budget deficit was allowed to widen. IMF also introduced the privatization of state-owned companies which is a new court to handle bankruptcy cases and a new bankruptcy law. The crisis hits its climax when Suharto once again re-elected as the leader and reformed new cabinet in March 1998 even though there are lots of demonstration and criticism towards the government. Things getting haywire when large-scale riot happened in Medan, Jakarta and Solo due to the government decide to reduce the subsidies of fuel in early May. IMF already gave time to Suharto to gradually reduce the subsidies but Suharto decided to do it all at once and it really hit the climax when on 12 May 1998, Trisakti shootings or Trisakti Tragedy happened where four Indonesian students were killed during a protest in one of local university in Jakarta demanding for Suharto’s resignation. Not only that, next couple of days in Jakarta became really bad when some of the Chinese stores and houses were burned and Chinese women were brutally raped. Due to that, finally Suharto step down as the prime minister. The one that replace Suharto is Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie which is vice president in Suharto’s last cabinet. After the replacement, the fourth agreement with IMF was signed in June 1998. Within couple of months, the sign of improvement and recovery started to show. The Indonesian Rupiah started to strengthen from mid-June 1998 to October 1998, which is from 16,000 rupiah per dollar to 8,000 rupiah per dollar. Inflation also reduce drastically where Jakarta stock exchange started to rise and non-oil exports started to revive but the banking sector still not in the good condition as banking sector caused increase in government debt as this debt was primarily due to the issuance of bank restructuring bonds. But, the country’s economy slowly improved through 1999. The financial crisis that happened is not solely due to the economic crisis it also because it was accompanied by a deep political and social crisis inside the government itself where Suharto refuse to implement the economic reform and also when all the riot happened where lots citizen injured and some of them died. Today, Indonesia is well on its way towards full democracy, despite it’s a process that is accompanied by growing pains.

References

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/crash/etc/cron.html http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/CIB/CIB9798/98cib13#INDO http://www.indonesia-investments.com/culture/economy/asian-financial-crisis/item246
https://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/ib/2000/062300.htm#box3

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