Who's Going to Miss Larry? Not Asia.

As much as Lawrence Summers did Barack Obama a favor by taking himself out of the running for Federal Reserve chairman, the economist did Asia a solid, too.

Asian markets have been gyrating like it's 1997 all over again, roiled by fears of a clumsy exit from the Fed's quantitative easing experiment. When investors in the West talk about "tapering," their peers in Asia tend to hear "market collapse." That fear is a legacy of the Fed's harsh, and messy, tightening cycle in 1994 -- a shock that helped precipitate Asia's meltdown three years later. The dollar's post-1994 rally made Asia's currency pegs impossible to maintain.