Greenspan Urges Nations to Share Data

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan on Friday said Thailand’s economic crisis showed that governments must provide investors with complete and timely economic and financial information and called for international financial institutions to force the issue.

In one of his first public comments on the Southeast Asian currency crisis, Greenspan told central bankers and economists at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., that Thailand’s woes and earlier troubles in Mexico showed that current levels of “transparency” are too low.

Greenspan, for the first time, put himself at odds with Southeast Asian government officials who have repeatedly blamed “foreign speculators,” notably hedge fund manager George Soros, for their woes.

Southeast Asian governments need “to make better and more accurate information available,” said Thomas Tull, a money manager in charge of $900 million at Gulfstream Global Investors Ltd. Greenspan may have been intending to send a message to central bankers and finance ministers at the symposium “that if you don’t respond more effectively and efficiently, make more accurate information available, and show more coordination as a region, there may be more problems like we’ve seen in Thailand,” Tull said.

Thailand devalued its monetary unit, the baht, on July 2, after committing most of its foreign reserves to a doomed defense of the currency. Since then, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia have let their currencies float. All promptly sank against the dollar--to record lows in the case of the baht, the Philippine peso and the Indonesian rupiah--as investors began to question whether the problems facing these fast-growing economies might be more akin to those in Thailand than first thought.

Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund and more than a dozen nations agreed to a $16-billion rescue package for Thailand. The country has been laid low by a financial crisis triggered by the slowest growth in a decade and a banking system riddled with bad loans to property developers who can’t meet their payments.

Mexico, too, was severely criticized by economists and investors after its recent crisis involving a failure to keep them informed on the state of the government’s finances and the nation’s economy. In response, the government began publishing more detailed data more quickly, including on the Internet.

After Greenspan’s comments were disseminated, Fed spokesman Joseph Coyne told news organizations that Greenspan’s comments on Mexico referred to the situation in 1994-95, not today.