THIS January at Davos, I heard a startling confession by Stanley Fischer, macro-economist and first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Over a drink, Fischer admitted that many of the traditional macro-economic indices of health had failed to reveal the magnitude of the crisis in East Asia. In particular, the IMF didn't get an early grip on the extent to which the rot had spread in banks, financial institutions and capital markets of South Korea and Indonesia. Fischer also acknowledged that understanding the micro-economics of banking, corporate governance and capital markets was critical, but admitted that the Fund didn't have in-house expertise to deal with such issues. The global emperor of macro-economics had no clothes.