Without mentioning them by name, the World Bank has fingered the International Monetary Fund and the Clinton administration as the culprits in the Asian financial crisis. In a 200-page report, the bank left little doubt that the I.M.F. and the U.S. Treasury Department blundered and mishandled the currency debacle.

Bank officials say they omitted any direct reference to the two as a conciliatory gesture. Both institutions have often disagreed with the bank on how to handle the crisis since it began 18 months ago.

• The bank's detailed account of a series of cascading misjudgments places much of the blame on global investors who lent money to developing nations with abandon -- and on Asian officials were eager to absorb cash.

• The bank argues that it would have been less harmful to let the Asian currencies fall while keeping interest rates low -- rather than raising them as the I.M.F. did as a condition to advancing billions of dollars in aid.

• Lower interest rates would have allowed the economies of the affected countries to revive in short order.

• The report predicts that most of the countries involved will probably begin climbing out of their recessions next year -- with growth continuing in 2000.

But it warns that a rebound is not certain and that "there is still a substantial risk that the world economy will plunge into a recession in 1999, "particularly if Japan is unable to end its recession."

At a seminar this week, a senior I.M.F. official conceded the fund had made some judgments "too quickly," and had mistakenly thought it was seeing a repeat of past currency crisis -- particularly the one that shook Mexico in 1995. Internally, the fund has been debating whether it erred when it loaned Russia $4.8 billion in July -- money which was wasted -- and whether it unintentionally contributed to a bank panic in Indonesia last year.

Source: David E. Sanger, "U.S. and I.M.F. Made Asia Crisis Worse, World Bank Finds," New York Times, December 3, 1998.

For World Bank report http://www.worldbank.org/prospects/gep98-99/full.htm