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The currency crisis in Asia may (read: surely will) limit money spent to repair the problem.
If it took an unlegislated $40 billion in credit guarantees from the IMF to bail out Indonesia, with a mere 16 banks shut down, what will it take to bail out Japan? (This is a rhetorical question. It isn't a trick question, however.) In this report, one nation is conspicuously absent from the estimates of how far advanvced the repair process is: Japan.
Also, the story is vague about defining the repair process. Does it mean inventory? Assessment? Actual code repair? This vagueness is not reassuring. Even less reassuring are the estimates of what percentage of firms have begun in Asia.
If Asia goes, we all go. There will be a wolrldwide economic disaster.
This is from Reuters (Dec. 10).
On the allocation of assets necessary to complete a y2k project, see the
California White Paper.
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Asia's currency crisis may have pushed aside another worry that the region will have to rush to resolve as the decade draws to a close--the millennium bug that threatens computer systems worldwide.
"There are some parallels at the moment with the economic problems of some countries and the Year 2000 [bug]," Digital Equipment's Year 2000 program manager David Tickner said.
"There's every likelihood that the currency crisis will prevent budgets being spent on 2000," he said. . . .
"Any calculations which rely on the date, such as interest payments, could be completely wrong and affect the confidence of investors," the stock exchange statement said. . . .
"The worst to be affected will be countries like Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore," Malpani said. "They have been late versus the United States in tackling the problem. These countries woke up very late to this problem." . . .
"India is very far ahead, with 44 percent of respondents already started with Year 2000 projects," he said. "In China, only about eight percent have already started their projects. You can see there's quite a big gap."
The other countries surveyed yielded the following results: Hong Kong (20 percent), Korea (17 percent), Malaysia (28 percent), and Singapore (33 percent).
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