A world recession in the offing?

As a layman in economics, I am confused about the recent brouhaha over the depreciation of the rupiah, the tight money policy, the floating foreign exchange rate, the skyrocketing interbank overnight rate of 160 percent per year, the deposit rate of 60 percent and others.

I believe that the chain reaction triggered by the depreciation of the rupiah can be foreseen. I think that this will happen not only in Indonesia but all over the world.

Newsweek magazine, in its Sept. 8 edition, reported that recession phobic giant companies in the U.S. are preparing for the worst. They are thinking in term of how to overcome a world recession.

I was five years old when the depression in the early 1930s broke out. My parents told me that the resulting unemployment led to social unrest and other undesirable situations in society.

At the end of the decade, John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath based on John Steinbeck's novel starring a young Henry Fonda, showed how a whole family loaded all their belongings into an old jalopy and traveled from East to West America in search of a better labor environment.

A. DJUANA

Jakarta