Former central bank governor Vijit dies at 77

Vijit suffered a blood clot that led to liver failure and his death on Sunday night.
 A funeral ceremony for Vijit has begun in Bangkok at Wat Phra Si Mahathat, where monks will give evening prayers for seven days.
He served as the central bank’s governor between October 1990 and July 1996.
Vijit, who was born in 1941, gained a bachelor of economics and social studies from Manchester University in Britain, and a master’s degree in international and foreign economics from Yale University in the United States.
Vijit resigned from the central bank and later became an economic adviser to the Thai Rak Thai Party, a forerunner to the Pheu Thai Party. 
He also served as chairman of the Exchange and Securities Commission.
More recently, he had been the dean of the College of Business Administration at Siam University since 2007. He was also an authorised director of APPLE Wealth Securities Co.
During Vijit’s tenure as central bank governor, the Bank of Thailand kept interest rates high in order to attract capital inflows to finance the investment boom that marked the lead-up to the Asian financial crisis.
The high interest rates combined with a fixed exchange rate led to large capital inflows and local companies ended up caught in a debt trap. It was believed that Vijit was forced to resign from the helm of the central bank due to his failure to solve a solvency crisis at the now defunct Bangkok Bank of Commerce
The country’s economic bubble burst the year after Vijit left the BOT. Thailand was forced to adopt a managed floating exchange rate on July 2, 1997, and the upheaval from that decision triggered the Asian financial crisis.