Rupiah woes, who is to blame ?

The 1997-1998 regional monetary crisis saw the rupiah exchange rate to the dollar at Rp 17,000, and up to Aug. 29 it reached nearly Rp 11,800. If further uncertainty prevailed, meaning the recent concrete measures taken by the government and the monetary authority did not help strengthen the rupiah, monetary crisis chapter two would be inevitable.

Calls from members of the House of Representatives and observers to immediately reshuffle the Cabinet, particularly President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's (SBY's) economic team, have aggravated the situation and seem to be unfair. There's a strong relationship between both SBY's economic team and the Central Bank (BI), the latter being the nation's monetary authority. Such calls should have also been addressed to it.

The recent drama could have been avoided had the BI done something. Take for, example, one of the first things the U.S. Fed governor Alan Greenspan did when he took leadership of the Federal Reserve. He put together a plan to follow in the event of a market emergency (The Jakarta Post, Aug. 29), meaning that crisis management became his hallmark.

Just two months into the job, he needed it as the stock market dropped 508 points on Oct. 19, 1987 (Black Monday) the biggest one-day loss since the Great Depression, sending shock waves through financial markets at home and abroad. What did he do then? He quickly reassured Wall Street that the central bank would supply all the credit necessary to keep the nation's financial system afloat.

During the recent crucial period, though to no avail, only Coordinating Minister for the Economy Aburizal Bakrie and Minister of Finance Yusuf Anwar visited the Jakarta Stock Exchange to help invigorate the slumping financial market. The BI governor and his deputies were nowhere to be found, and instead it was SBY who made a visit to the BI's office to discuss the matter.

M. RUSDI, Jakarta