There is a line I have quoted before, and I will lean on it once more because it has not stopped being true. You only find out who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out. A few weeks ago I wrote that the tide was going out on Indonesia, and I spent most of that essay worrying about what we were about to find out. The rupiah had just broken through Rp17,300. Reserves were thinning. The ratings agencies had begun to frown. I argued then for the unglamorous things, a measured rate hike, a patient rescaling of the budget, and a single voice between the government and Bank Indonesia, because those are the things that decide whether a country is wearing anything when the water leaves. The water has gone out further since then. As I write, the rupiah sits at roughly Rp18,000 to the dollar, a level it touched for the first time this past week. So this is, in part, a confession that my worries were not misplaced. But it is also something I did not expect to be writing so soon. It is an...