The Wind of the Hundred Days

In this collection of public policy essays, Jagdish Bhagwati applies his characteristic wit and accessible style to the subject of globalization. Notably, he argues that the true Clinton scandal lay in the administration’s mismanagement of globalization—resulting in the paradox of immense domestic policy success combined with dramatic failure on the external front. Bhagwati assigns the bulk of the blame for the East Asian financial and economic crisis—a disaster that prompts him to use as his title the poet Octavio Paz’s image of devastation “I met the wind of the hundred days”—to the administration’s hasty push for financial liberalization in the region.