The Commanding Heights (Part 3): The New Rules of the Game (cont.)

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Chapter 9: China and the Tigers [ 5:35 ]

NARRATOR: In the early '90s, David Lee returned to his homeland for the first time in over four decades.
Onscreen caption: Shanghai , China

DAVID LEE: I was always afraid to go back to a communist country. I was born in Beijing , actually right in Tiananmen Square . And we left there after the revolution in 1949. We were very lucky we were able to leave the country. We were like the boat people on top of a cargo ship. We left everything. The only thing [we had] is whatever we could carry.

This is a free-trade zone. Anything you do in here you don't have to pay tariff, or you can build the thing and then ship it out for export purposes.

NARRATOR: David Lee set up a joint venture in a free-trade zone near Shanghai . Lee saw firsthand a China in the midst of epic economic transformation.

China 's Communist leadership had embraced markets and welcomed hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment. Almost one-quarter of the world's population was entering the global market for the first time.
Onscreen caption: Economic reforms lifted 300 million Chinese out of poverty.

In villages across China and throughout the developing world, people left their rural homes. They traveled to industrial towns, seeking work in new factories built to serve the global market.

The era of globalization saw the largest wave of human migration in history. Eighty percent of the world's future economic growth is expected to occur in cities rather than the countryside.

LIN SHENGXIN, Factory Worker, China : I was a schoolteacher in the countryside. At that time I only earned 100 a month. My parents are both farmers, so we lived a very poor life. But now I'm earning 3,000 a month. My life is totally different. My child is going to school here, near the factory. So we are living a much, much better life now.


Onscreen caption: Singapore

NARRATOR: China 's leaders hoped to emulate the "tiger economies" of Southeast Asia , where trade and investment had transformed once-impoverished nations.

LEE KUAN YEW, Senior Minister of Singapore : When the British came here in 1819, they found a fishing village of about 120 people. When the empire broke up, everybody wanted to do their own trading, and we could easily have withered on the vine. So we just had to make ourselves relevant to the world. And the countries that make themselves relevant become better off; their people become better off. Those who opt out, they suffer.

NARRATOR: Since the 1970s, the countries of Southeast Asia had become became world-class exporters, shipping everything from cars to computers across the globe.

DANIEL YERGIN: They called it the Asian economic miracle because the world had not really seen that kind of economic growth, that many people brought out of poverty, that rapid a creation of a middle class so quickly anywhere in the history of the world.

NARRATOR: By the mid-90s, many Asian economies were growing at the astonishing rate of 10 percent or more each year.

LEE HSIEN LOONG, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore : There was a tremendous confidence and hope that this was the Asian century, and the place was being transformed, and you just had to put money there and it would grow on trees.

DANIEL YERGIN: I remember the CEO of one major company in about 1995 or so saying, "If we're not investing in Asia tomorrow, we're too late."

Chapter 10: The Japanese Paradox [ 3:01 ]

Onscreen caption: Tokyo , Japan

NARRATOR: Yet there was one big exception. Japan , the world's second largest economy, had fallen into a deep, unexpected slump that shook the confidence of its people.

KAORI MARUYA, Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Japan : Japan was in the so-called bubble economy, and at that time the Japanese people were not very careful about debt. After the collapse of the bubble economy, people came back to reality and came down from their dreams.

Onscreen caption: Japanese banks hold $1 trillion in bad debts.

NARRATOR: Japan 's economy once looked unstoppable, but it was slow to adapt to the rapid changes of a fast-moving, interconnected world.

EISUKE SAKAKIBARA, Vice Minister of Finance, Japan, 1997-1999: Japan is a very sort of parochial and very closed economy; there's no question about it. Walk around the Japanese cities, you don't see many foreigners.

NARRATOR: Japan , the great exporter, protected its domestic industries. At the heart of the country's economic problems lay a contradiction.

EISUKE SAKAKIBARA: One sector of the Japanese economy is an export-oriented sector which is highly competitive, consisting of Toyotas and Sonys. And the other is domestic manufacturing sector which is extremely uncompetitive. We have a market-oriented capitalistic system on the one hand; we have a very socialistic, egalitarian sector on the other.

NARRATOR: In Japan , government bureaucrats managed a highly regulated economy. As Masahisa Naitoh was to learn, ideas about change met with profound skepticism.

MASAHISA NAITOH, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Japan, 1961-1993: I wanted to deregulate our financial system. The new global markets of the 1990s created a new reality. I said we had to change for Japan to thrive in the new world economy. My colleagues in the government criticized me. They said that it was in the best interest of Japan that my ideas be destroyed.

NARRATOR: Naitoh was fired without warning. Japan stuck to its old ways, and the nation's economic slump continued. For the first time, an Asian "economic miracle" was in trouble.

Chapter 11: Global Contagion Begins [ 7:55 ]

Onscreen caption: Bangkok , Thailand

By early 1997, Southeast Asia 's rapid economic boom was overheating. Sirivat Voravetvuthikun was one of many who thought the good times would never end.

SIRIVAT VORAVETVUTHIKUN, Former Real Estate Developer, Thailand : Ever since I was a child, I have been wanting to be a multimillionaire. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to do something that no one has done -- build a luxurious condominium. I knew a lot of rich people and multimillionaires would like to take time off to play golf, to enjoy the fresh air in the mountains, which you cannot find in Bangkok.

I looked at the golf course. It's designed by Jack Nicklaus. I put my effort into making it one of the most beautiful condominiums in Thailand . Still today, with the mountains in the background, with a fairway and a lake in front of the condominium, it's really beautiful.

ANAND PANYARACHUN, Prime Minister of Thailand, 1991-1993: People were just buying apartments and condominiums like they were gambling. And they were tempted by this easy money, tempted by this easy profit.

NARRATOR: During the '90s, Thailand had opened up its capital markets. For the first time, local businesses could borrow money from foreign banks which offered lower interest rates.

ANAND PANYARACHUN: People would come and knock on your door and plead with you to borrow, be they European or Japanese banks. The Western financial world, the banks or the financial companies, they came and begged us to borrow from them.

NARRATOR: In just four years, loans to Thai businesses had tripled to over $200 billion. American and European governments encouraged the inflow of money.

ROBERT RUBIN: Oh, yeah. We were very strong advocates of opening up capital markets and the benefits that could flow there from, but we were also strong advocates at the same time, because we recognized the tie of developing the banking systems, the capital markets, and developing regulatory systems, none of which is easy.

DANIEL YERGIN: And there was an underlying flaw in the system that people really didn't focus very much on, which was the institutional weakness. What that meant is the banking systems were not well developed; securities laws were not well developed. They had not kept up with the development of these economies and their integration into the world economy.

NARRATOR: Thailand 's Central Bank had kept its currency artificially high, fueling the speculative bubble.

The International Monetary Fund, which acts as a bank of last resort to countries in financial trouble, began to worry that Thailand was heading for a fall.

STANLEY FISCHER, First Deputy Managing Director, International Monetary Fund, 1994-2001: I went to Bangkok in May 1997. It was full of cranes everywhere, and it looked like the boom would never end. But they were very weak banks who were lending against buildings which were never going to be filled.

NARRATOR: Muang Thong Thani was a sign of the times -- a " new city " built from scratch for 700,000 people. It was meant to be bigger than Boston . But almost no one was moving in.

MARK MOBIUS: The vision was great. The vision was to take this huge tract of land and build a city, basically. between the downtown congested Bangkok and the airport. So the concept was excellent. The problem was it was financed by U.S. dollars.

NARRATOR: Thailand 's currency, known as the baht, was pegged to the dollar. As the Thai economy weakened, financial markets sensed this policy couldn't last.

STANLEY FISCHER: Thailand had fixed the value of its currency in terms of dollars. It had a fixed exchange rate. And as people began to wonder, "Well, do they actually have enough dollars to always be able to give me dollars in exchange for the baht, the Thai currency I have?," and when they begin to wonder about that, they start asking for the dollars, and then they attack the currency.

MARK MOBIUS: The Central Bank kept saying no, no, no. And they were shelling out the U.S. dollars to protect the currency. So their foreign reserves were dwindling, and of course any hedge fund manager looking at that would say, "Hey, these guys are going to be in trouble, and I'm going to short the Thai baht."

NARRATOR: The baht came under relentless market pressure. In July 1997, the Thai government was forced to devalue.

The bubble had burst. The Asian financial crisis was about to begin.

SIRVAT VORAVETVUTHIKUN: When the crisis hit, I realized my fate. I could not sell a single unit when the crisis hit.

My condominium is called the American dream home, dream condominium. But we are broke. Even my clients who were multibillionaires are broke also.

NARRATOR: The economic shock reverberated throughout all levels of Thai society.

PANJIT NIYOMDET, Factory Worker, Bangkok . Thailand : When the economy went bad, my husband's salary was cut 30 percent. I was lucky; I kept my job, but I didn't get a raise. To support our family, my husband had to find other work.

NARRATOR: The cost of living was rising. Everything was going up -- water, electricity, even soap. But the salaries were staying the same, or going down.

With its economy in a virtual free fall, Thailand received an emergency rescue loan from the International Monetary Fund. When that didn't work, the Thai government asked Washington for even more help.

No one imagined that an economy as small as Thailand 's could spark a global crisis.

Chapter 12: Contagion Engulfs Asia [ 7:13 ]

LAURA TYSON: Thailand is a very small economy. It didn't have a lot of links, and it's not exactly in your backyard. So in any event, the U.S. chose not to intervene in Thailand , thinking it was not going to spill over. Why would it? The contagion effects were not apparent to anybody, not just the administration.

LEE HSIEN LOONG: I think they misjudged the situation. They misjudged the situation, probably because it was seen too much as a financial issue rather than an overall strategic issue.

NARRATOR: Global markets worried that other Asian countries might have similar hidden flaws. Like a classic run on the bank, money began to pull out of the entire region. They called it contagion.

Onscreen caption: $116 billion flowed out of Southeast Asian markets.

DANIEL YERGIN: And at each stage, the crisis turned out to have a virulence that became known as contagion, much greater than anticipated. And what that really reflected was indeed globalization, was the way these economies had become locked together and investors looked at emerging markets. They said there was a problem in Thailand ; well, then there's a problem in these other countries. And so each step of the crisis created these shock waves that carried on into the next.

Onscreen caption: Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia , July 1997

NARRATOR: Contagion spread to Thailand 's neighbors. Malaysia 's economy had seemed stable. Suddenly, it, too, was facing relentless pressure from global markets.

MAHATHIR BIN MOHAMAD: We have the currency going down and down and down, and we have the stock market doing the same. The index kept on going down, no matter what we do. And we felt totally helpless. We felt that there was no way we could recover. So, I mean, the feeling was very bad, very frightening.
Onscreen caption: Jakarta , Indonesia

NARRATOR: Contagion next hit Indonesia , the most populous country in the region. Its government collapsed; its cities descended into chaos.

LEE KUAN YEW: The fund managers didn't know the difference between Indonesia and Malaysia , Thailand , Singapore . They just said, "I want out." Property prices collapsed; companies collapsed. And in the case of Indonesia , the social fabric collapsed. Churches have been burnt; mosques have been attacked; they have killed each other. This will take years to heal. And it's all the fallout of an economic collapse.

NARRATOR: This was a new kind of financial crisis, unlike anything the International Monetary Fund had ever encountered. The IMF organized huge loans for Indonesia and other Asian nations, on the condition they cut government spending, raise interest rates, and eliminate corruption.

STANLEY FISCHER: You're the doctor going in to deal with a very sick patient. The public blames the doctor for the fact that the patient is sick, but the patient was sick to begin with. But these things are societally wrenching, and there are huge vested interests, and you wouldn't get into these crises if the vested interests weren't that important. That I think is why it takes political change to deal with a crisis as big as this.

NARRATOR: To some of the region's entrenched leaders, the IMF's conditions smacked of a new kind of colonialism.

MAHATHIR BIN MOHAMAD: Presently we see a well-planned effort to undermine the economies of all the Asian countries by destabilizing their currencies.

In the old days you needed to conquer a country with military force, and then you could control that country. Today it is not necessary at all. You can destabilize a country, make it poor, and then make a request for help, and for the help that is given, you gain control over the policies of the country, and when you gain control over the policies of a country, effectively you have colonized that country.

NARRATOR: The market forces were simply too powerful for the IMF, or any government, to contain. In late 1997, contagion reached Korea , one of the most successful economies in the world.

EISUKE SAKAKIBARA: It was unbelievable that the crisis had spread as quickly as to Indonesia and Korea, and within a matter of six months or seven months. But the world was much globalized that we thought it was at that time.
Onscreen caption: Seoul, Korea, December 1997

ROBERT RUBIN: In the last week of December of 1997, the 11th largest country -- economy, rather -- in the world, which was Korea, had roughly speaking $4 billion of reserves left and was using reserves at the rate of $1 billion a day. Well, it didn't take a great deal of quantitative insight to see that that was not a long-term viable situation.

NARRATOR: Korea had been misleading the world, claiming it had enough money to withstand the crisis. The IMF's Stanley Fischer arrived in Seoul to inspect the Central Bank's accounts.

STANLEY FISCHER: I visited Korea a couple of days before they turned to the IMF for help, and it was a circus atmosphere. It was a state of panic, and it was at that point that I went to the Central Bank and was shown how much money was left in the Korean Central bank. It was essentially all gone.

NARRATOR: Korea was about to default on its loans from Japanese and Western banks. Pressured by their governments, the banks agreed to share some of the pain: They rolled over their loans. Korea was then given the largest bailout in history.

Onscreen caption: Korea received $55 billion in new loans and credits.

LEE HSIEN LOONG: If they had done that in Thailand, I think that they would have not only avoided some economic problems, but I think that a sense in Southeast Asia that the Americans were really on the side of putting things right would have been stronger.

Chapter 13: Russia Defaults [ 2:31 ]

WILLIAM McDONOUGH, President, Federal Reserve Bank of New York : Then a very, very strange thing happened. From about the first of February until the beginning of August, there was a period in which financial markets essentially decided that risk didn't exist anywhere.

Onscreen caption: Moscow , August 1998

NARRATOR: Markets thought contagion had been contained in Asia . Investment flowed elsewhere. Some came to Russia, where the Moscow stock market was the best performing in the world. But economic reforms had stalled, and Russia was heavily in debt. Even so, investors were convinced they'd found an emerging market that couldn't fail.

WILLIAM McDONOUGH: Investors had decided Russia is an ex-superpower; it has lots of missiles and lots of atomic warheads -- certainly you could not have a financial accident in Russia, because the rest of the world, the rich countries, would bail Russia out. Well, it turned out that that was wrong.

NARRATOR: Russia defaulted on its debt. Its currency plummeted. Global investors were stunned.

WILLIAM McDONOUGH: All these people who in the previous seven months had decided there was no risk anywhere literally panicked and decided there's got to be massive risk everywhere. Behind each fence and barnyard wall there must be a risk that we hadn't though of, you know, like the redcoats retreating from Lexington.

NARRATOR: Everywhere, markets were freezing up. The economic crisis seemed to have taken on a life of its own.

ROBERT RUBIN: I thought at the time that I had a pretty good sense of what was going on. But what I didn't know, and nobody could possibly have known, was not what was going on at the moment that you were looking at, but what was going to happen at the next moment.

RICHARD GEPHARDT, Democratic Leader, U.S. House of Representatives: When you get in a room with both Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin and they say they're scared to death, and they've never seen anything like this, and they're worried about whether they can get through it, I get worried, because they know a heck of a lot more about it than I do. You had the contagion sweeping across the developing countries. As Rubin said, we'd never seen that before. I mean, maybe in the Depression they saw that over a period of time, but nothing happened that quickly.

Chapter 14: The Crisis Reaches America [ 7:07 ]

NARRATOR: Now the crisis had reached America . A little-known but powerful private investment fund was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Long Term Capital Management, or LTCM, directly controlled $100 billion of global assets and, indirectly, more than a trillion dollars.

JON CORZINE, Co-chairman, Goldman Sachs, 1994-1999: The '90s saw a huge buildup in concentrations that we had never seen on a global scale. Maybe we had way back in history. Maybe the Romans had financial institutions that were disproportionately large to the overall activity of the world that they operated in, but LTCM was a specific type of hedge fund. They were involved whether it was the Singapore exchange, the Tokyo stock exchange, the London stock exchange, the New York. There was no market that they weren't [involved in] -- maybe the largest player, or close to the largest player.

NARRATOR: By September 1998, LTCM's losses were spiraling out of control. Contagion had arrived on Wall Street. Incredibly, the failure of this single investment fund threatened the entire global economy.

DANIEL YERGIN: If LTCM went down, it would be just the gears, the machine just stopping, the economy not working. And of course it's not just what's on the balance sheet of banks and so forth, but that would translate into people not working, businesses not operating, small businesses not being able to get their capital they need. And this in a global economy. It was almost inconceivable to see what the picture was, but it was sort of just not working, and people just not working.

NARRATOR: The New York Federal Reserve summoned representatives of major U.S. and European banks to an urgent meeting. Jon Corzine, then at Goldman Sachs, was among them.

JON CORZINE: The real problem of Long Term Capital was nobody really understood all the downsides. All one knew was it was going to be extraordinarily dangerous to enter into that. And everybody, I think, understood the Fed's concern that that had real implications to the real economy.

NARRATOR: Since LTCM was a private fund, the government could not impose a solution. The fate of the global economy was in the hands of these bankers.

WILLIAM McDONOUGH: The head of a securities firm or a bank is not paid to be a patriot. He or she is paid to serve the best interests of the shareholders, so the most that one could do in a position like mine is to say the public interest may well be served by Long Term Capital Management not failing, but there is no public-sector money to solve the problem. The taxpayer is not going to do this. You folks have to decide whether it's in your interest to do it.

NARRATOR: The banks agreed to put up their own money to rescue LTCM. Wall Street had averted disaster, but the global crisis had one final chapter to go.

Onscreen caption: Rio de Janeiro , Brazil , December 1998

What had started in Asia now reached Brazil , the eighth largest economy in the world. But this time, a loan package was put in place early. Brazil's government cut spending and enacted reforms.

It worked. Brazil's problems were contained. Global financial markets gradually returned to normal.

ROBERT RUBIN: Well, and it's not clear when you would say it ended, but what happened was that the countries that actually took ownership of reform -- Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Brazil -- began to reestablish stability in their financial markets, and their economies started to recover. And after a while there came a point we began to feel, "Well, maybe we're past the crisis." Then a little bit past that we said, "You know, it does look like we are past the crisis." And finally we got to the point where we said, "Well, we think this is over."

NARRATOR: The world economy had survived the first crisis of the globalization era, but millions of ordinary people had paid the price.

ANAND PANYARACHUN: And that's the unfortunate part of so-called globalization, because such negative effects can be totally responsible, can come very fast. It takes decades for a country to grow up to a certain level, and all of a sudden it disappears.

SIRIVAT VORAVETVUTHIKUN: We've been a poor country, so we never tasted richness. When we tasted the richness, we wanted more, being greedy. I blame myself also; I never had enough.

Yeah, it's quite a view, and I really feel bad because no one can enjoy it now. It's all left to the bank. Nice fairway and nice lake. It's so sad.

I had a big dream and couldn't achieve it. That's why I am today standing selling things for two hours. But after four years of struggling, at least I know I have a chance. Today my big dream is to be McDonald's of Thailand, because selling sandwiches on the streets, now I've developed a new Japanese sushi. I use Thai brown rice. I am the first in Thailand. So hopefully in the near future I will raise my funds in the local stock market so in the future I will be McDonald's of Thailand.

Chapter 15: The Global Debate [ 2:49 ]

NARRATOR: The global economy rested on institutions that dated back to the end of the second world war. The contagion crisis proved that the new era of globalization needed new rules.

WILLIAM McDONOUGH: We have to improve the rules of the game. You want the financial system essentially to be like the shock absorber in a car. When you hit a pothole the car still bounces, but have you ever been in one that didn't have a shock absorber? If you have a good, strong shock absorber, at least you get through the pothole and you're still driving in the same direction that you thought you were when you hit it.

LEE HSIEN LOONG: I think the morale is that there are risks to globalization. But in the end there is no alternative to globalization. So don't let your banks go lend recklessly; don't allow bubbles to get out of hand. Keep prudent measures, sound economic policies which will inspire confidence and maintain confidence so in a crisis people will know that you will stay the course and won't panic and be up and off. It's easier said than done, but these are the principles you have to follow.

LAWRENCE SUMMERS, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, 1999-2001: We had a close call. And without an activist international policy, you could have seen perhaps a serious and economic downturn as we'd seen any time since the Great Depression. And that's why we need to continue to understand the dynamics of financial crisis better. And that's why especially the United States needs to be prepared to take a lead in working to contain financial crises.

NARRATOR: For many Americans, the world financial crisis created new unease about the risks of the global economy.

LORI WALLACH, Global Trade Watch: People sense the instability of it. They get indicators of it, but they sense it. They get indicators like big meltdowns, like the financial crises in Asia . But they also get indicators of things like, you know, the local bank which just keeps getting merged and renamed. And like your card does work, and it doesn't work, and the name keeps changing every three weeks. And you combine that with the real financial cataclysms like the Asian meltdown, and a lot of people in their everyday life are seeing this sort of out-of-control scenario very personally. You know, it's out of their personal control.

NARRATOR: For critics like Lori Wallach, this was an opportunity. Together with allies in labor unions, they began to channel public anxiety into what came to be known as the anti-globalization movement.

Chapter 16: The Battle Joined [ 5:08 ]

Onscreen caption: Seattle , December 1999

The World Trade Organization, known as the WTO, manages the rules that govern global trade. In late 1999, delegates from 135 nations gathered in Seattle . They planned to launch a new round of negotiations that would expand trade even further. Instead, Seattle was a watershed.

DANIEL YERGIN: As one could see from the way Seattle exploded, it really caught the people of the World Trade Organization meeting there quite by surprise. The World Trade Organization meeting became a lightning rod for all of those people across this very broad spectrum who are concerned by some aspect of globalization or what they perceive as globalization or by the causes that animate and move them.

LESBIAN AVENGERS: The WTO, which is led by CEOs of the company that make bovine growth hormone, get to make rules saying that these countries can't ban an unsafe product.

NARRATOR: While the protestors represented an array of interest groups, the majority were from American labor unions, which had bussed in thousands of their members.

THEA LEE: People came together from all over the world in Seattle to say that the rules of the current global economy as embodied in the World Trade Organization are unfair. They're bad for developing countries, they're bad for workers, and they're bad for the environment.

NARRATOR: In the 1990s, the expanding U.S. economy created 17 million new jobs, but unions' share of the workforce had fallen dramatically. The AFL-CIO blamed cheap labor overseas. As an example, they pointed to this factory in China , where workers are paid five dollars a day to make bicycles once built in America .

THEA LEE: Our workers are in direct competition to workers overseas. We can't control whether every single job stays in the United States or not, but it's another thing to lose jobs to workers who are not represented by independent trade unions. And so that changes the nature of competition that American workers face.

NARRATOR: Countries that opened their markets saw their overall wealth and living standards increase, yet the politics of trade were less straightforward than the economics.

LAWRENCE SUMMERS: It's always difficult to sell open markets. There's a basic cost of open markets. Whether it's somebody losing a job particularly or very obvious, the benefits are much less clear. Who said on Christmas day, "Gosh, thanks -- without open markets I would have been only able to buy half as many toys for my kid"? Or whoever says, "You know, I'm not that great a worker, but they really had no choice to promote me given the surge and export demand"? On the other hand, every job loss that can be remotely connected to international trade, people do. So this problem of invisible beneficiaries and visible losers is one that bedevils the political economy of trade.

THEA LEE: The truth is that the business community has very good access to the international institution and to their own governments. And we hit the streets because we feel that we have a hard time getting our government to listen, or that our governments are unresponsive to the concerns that we've raised. And we think we can do better. We think we could write a set of rules for the global economy that would ensure that corporations had to live up to a minimum standard.

NARRATOR: But inside the Seattle meeting, the unions' demands met stiff resistance from the developing world. They wanted more trade, not less. Poorer countries charged that America and Europe unfairly protect industries with powerful union and business support.

JAIRAM RAMESH, Senior Economic Advisor to India 's Congress Party, 1991-1998: The fact is the rules of the game are tilted in favor of the economically powerful. I understand, I respect that, and until India is economically powerful we are not going to be able to influence the rules of the game. Let's take the textile trade. Now all textile imports into America , for example, are governed by quotas. Every country is allocated a certain quota. It's not free trade. It's managed trade. America is free to sell textiles to us, but we are not free to sell textiles to America .

NARRATOR: Developing countries forged a negotiating bloc to make Western markets more open.

DELEGATE: This should not be a time when big countries, strong countries, the world's wealthiest countries, are setting about a process designed to enrich themselves.