Myanmar’s junta puts $75bn at risk in the worst possible way

William Pesek is an award-winning Tokyo-based journalist and author of “Japanization: What the World Can Learn from Japan’s Lost Decades.”

You could say economist Sean Turnell, who is currently being detained by Myanmar’s military, saw the Donald Trump era coming.

The longtime Myanmar resident made a name as an Aung San Suu Kyi whisperer. When foreign CEOs, bankers and journalists visited Yangon or Naypyidaw, Turnell, an Australian, topped the list of meetings you hoped to score. Not just for his high-level access, but his ability to articulate where one of Asia’s most tantalizingly frontier economies is headed. Not spin, but the real deal.

In my own chats with Turnell, whose first job was at the Reserve Bank of Australia, he often talked up the credible financial system that the Central Bank of Myanmar was crafting quietly and meticulously behind the scenes. Ignore the politics and…