A piece by Simon Johnson (a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund) and James Kwak (a student at Yale Law School) examining the lessons learned by the financial disasters in Asia in 1997:

The argument that A.I.G.’s traders are the people that we must depend on to save the United States economy is as weak and self-serving as it was in Thailand, Korea or Indonesia. A.I.G. is essentially advocating survival of the weakest. Thankfully, the American people are not buying it.

Essentially the countries (Korea and Thailand) that rejected the argument [that the traders who got them into the collapse were the only ones who understood it enough to get them out] ended up with banks that recovered more quickly and are handling the current economic crisis better.  Indonesia, which bought into this argument, ended up with failed banks.

Read the whole thing here.