Management of Indonesian Private Foreign Borrowings: A Balanced Policy?

" If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million it has ." (John Maynard Keynes - British Economist and founder of the Keynesian School) Introduction Keynes' brilliant statement above can accurately describes one of the most crucial problems of international financing activities, i.e., overconfidence in giving loans to companies from emerging markets, which is highly risked, tends to create problems rather than improvements. Problems not only to the financial institutions involving in such financing activities but also to the debtors, as in the end both of them are facing losses, not profits. This overconfidence, combined with a lack of supervision from the Indonesian authorities can be considered as one of the main factors of the financial crisis in 1997. In that fateful tragedy, an already huge amount of foreign debts which were borrowed recklessly by Indonesian private companies suddenly turned into an endless pool of debt w