THE economic team of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s second government is both surprising and worrying. There are new faces in important posts, while the remaining people performed poorly in the previous period. To compare it with driving a car, President Yudhoyono has gone back to bottom gear. However, if he had retained more members of the old team, he could go straight into third or fourth gear.

There were several successes during the first peri