I know that when I look at today’s Mexicans and Central Americans, they seem to me fundamentally the same as my grandparents seeking a better life in… - Paul Krugman

The kind of economic trouble that Asia experienced a decade ago, and that we're all experiencing now, is precisely the sort of thing we thought we had learned to prevent. In the bad old days big, advanced economies with stable governments-like Britain in the 1920s-might have had no answer to prolonged periods of stagnation and deflation; but between John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, we thought we knew enough to keep that from happening again.

Feldstein pointed out that throughout the tax system inflation was turning tolerable paper tax rates into very high effective rates. Corporations, for example, were supposed to pay a tax rate of 42 percent on their profits. Feldstein calculated, however, that when the effects of inflation were taken into account, the true tax on any profits from investing in equipment was more like 75 percent.
You don't need to be a Republican to accept that tax rates this high might discourage investment and hurt economic growth. But was the interaction between inflation and investment really a major villain in America's economic difficulties? There the evidence was less clear.

Here’s what the IMF did: In Asia (as opposed to Brazil, which as I said was a sort of caricature of the Asian programs) it did not tell countries to defend the values of their currencies at all cost. But it did tell them to raise interest rates, initially to very high levels, in an attempt to persuade investors to keep their money in place. Some vociferous critics of the IMF—most notably Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs—said that this was very much the wrong thing to do. Sachs believed, in effect, that Asian countries could and should have behaved like Australia, simply letting their currencies decline until they started to look cheap to investors, and that if they had done so, the great slump would never have happened.
What the IMF said in response is that Asia is not Australia: that to let the currencies fall unchecked would have led to “hyperdevaluations,” and that the result would have been both massive financial distress (because so many businesses had debt denominated in dollars) and soaring inflation. The trouble with this rationale is, of course, that the massive financial distress happened anyway, thanks to high interest rates and the recession they helped cause. So the IMF at best avoided one vicious circle only by starting another.