Imf Quotes

Say goodbye to the IMF once and for all as the IMF's conditions enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor.

...while the IMF certainly failed the people of Asia, it did not fail Wall Street - far from it. The hot money may have been spooked by the IMF's drastic measures, but the large investment houses and multinational firms were emboldened...These fun-seeking firms understood that as a result of the IMF's "adjustments," pretty much everything in Asia was now up for sale - and the more the market panicked, the more desperate Asian companies would be to sell, pushing their prices through the floor.

Marcia Wilson was a good example of Omega’s core strategy for creating a New World Order. It involved placing their people, or moles, in positions of power within the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the White House and global organizations like the UN, the IMF and the World Bank. This enabled Omega to pull some of the strings of these organizations and to direct American, and world politics, to an extent.

I became convinced that the advanced industrial countries, through international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank, were not only not doing all that they could to help these [developing] countries but were sometimes making their life more difficult. IMF programs had clearly worsened the East Asian crisis, and the "shock therapy" they had pushed in the former Soviet Union and its satellites played an important role in the failure of the transition.

The rich world dominates the training of Ph.D. economists, and the students of rich-world Ph.D. programs dominate the international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which have the lead in advising poor countries on how to break out of poverty.

The United States thus achieved what no earlier imperial system had put in place: a flexible form of global exploitation that controlled debtor countries by imposing the Washington Consensus via the IMF and World Bank, while the Treasury bill standard obliged the payments-surplus nations of Europe and East Asia to extend forced loans to the U.S. Government. Against dollar-deficit regions the United States continued to apply the classical economic leverage that Europe and Japan were not able to use against it. Debtor economies were forced to impose economic austerity to block their own industrialization and agricultural modernization. Their designated role was to export raw materials and provide low-priced labor whose wages were denominated in depreciating currencies. Against dollar-surplus nations the United States was learning to apply a new, unprecedented form of coercion. It dared the rest of the world to call its bluff and plunge the international economy into monetary crisis. That is what would have happened if creditor nations had not channeled their surplus savings to the United States by buying its Government securities.

the International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world’s debt enforcers—“You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs.” I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the ’70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn’t figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called “go-go banking”); how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early ’80s; how, during the ’80s and ’90s, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on

But what will happen, and I got this from reliable sources, is that the International Monetary Fund will skedaddle from D.C., possibly to Singapore or Beijing, and then they're going to make an IMF recovery plan for America, divide the country into concessions, and hand them over to the sovereign wealth funds. Norway, China, Saudi Arabia, all that jazz.

Argentina & Iraq have been decimated by the same process with different weapons; an IMF cheque & cruise missiles.

You are of course right, Yanis. These targets that they insist on can’t work. But, you must understand that we have put too much into this programme. We cannot go back on it. Your credibility depends on accepting and working within this programme.2 So, there I had it. The head of the IMF was telling the finance minister of a bankrupt government that the policies imposed upon his country couldn’t work. Not that it would be hard to make them work. Not that the probability of them working was low. No, she was acknowledging that, come hell or high water, they couldn’t work. With

Earning money from, and supporting, a system that keeps these people in poverty in the first place and then gives them some of the profits in the form of "strings-attached" aid or World Bank and IMF loans is no more ridiculous than Shell or Esso giving Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth £10,000 to help clear up the destruction that they inevitably cause. Would it not be better not to cause the destruction in the first place?

DB: There's a lot of talk about terrorism. In fact, it's become almost an obsession for the media in the United States. But it's a very narrow definition of terrorism. AR: Yes. It completely ignores the economic terrorism unleashed by neoliberalism, which devastates the lives of millions of people, depriving them of water, food, electricity. Denying them medicine. Denying them education. Terrorism is the logical extension of this business of the free market. Terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war - people who believe that it isn't only the state that can wage war, but private parties as well. If you look at the logic underlying an act of terrorism and the logic underlying a retaliatory war against terrorism, they are the same. Both terrorists and governments make ordinary people pay for the actions of their governments. Osama bin Laden is making people pay for the actions of the US state, whether it's in Saudi Arabia, Palestine, or Afghanistan. The US government is making the people of Iraq pay for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The people of Afghanistan pay for the crimes of the Taliban. The logic is the same. Osama bin Laden and George Bush are both terrorists. They are both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people's lives. Bush, with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al Qaeda.

Beyond the speculative and often fraudulent froth that characterizes much of neoliberal financial manipulation, there lies a deeper process that entails the springing of ‘the debt trap’ as a primary means of accumulation by dispossession. Crisis creation, management, and manipulation on the world stage has evolved into the fine art of deliberative redistribution of wealth from poor countries to the rich. I documented the impact of Volcker’s interest rate increase on Mexico earlier. While proclaiming its role as a noble leader organizing ‘bail-outs’ to keep global capital accumulation on track, the US paved the way to pillage the Mexican economy. This was what the US Treasury–Wall Street–IMF complex became expert at doing everywhere. Greenspan at the Federal Reserve deployed the same Volcker tactic several times in the 1990s. Debt crises in individual countries, uncommon during the 1960s, became very frequent during the 1980s and 1990s. Hardly any developing country remained untouched, and in some cases, as in Latin America, such crises became endemic. These debt crises were orchestrated, managed, and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets. Since 1980, it has been calculated, ‘over fifty Marshall Plans (over $4.6 trillion) have been sent by the peoples at the Periphery to their creditors in the Center’. ‘What a peculiar world’, sighs Stiglitz, ‘in which the poor countries are in effect subsidizing the richest.

The secular are at this moment in history a great deal more optimistic than the religious – something of an irony, given the frequency with which the latter have been derided by the former for their apparent naivety and credulousness. It is the secular whose longing for perfection has grown so intense as to lead them to imagine that paradise might be realized on this earth after just a few more years of financial growth and medical research. With no evident awareness of the contradiction they may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics could together cure the ills of mankind.... It is telling that the secular world is not well versed in the art of gratitude: we no longer offer up thanks for harvests, meals, bees or clement weather. On a superficial level, we might suppose that this is because there is no one to say ‘Thank you’ to. But at base it seems more a matter of ambition and expectation. Many of those blessings for which our pious and pessimistic ancestors offered thanks, we now pride ourselves on having worked hard enough to take for granted.

Everything is argued over in this world. Apart from only one thing that is not argued over. Nobody argues about democracy. Democracy is there as if it was some sort of saint in the altar from whom miracles are no longer expected. But it’s there as a reference. A reference. Democracy. And no-one attends to the matter that the democracy in which we live is a democracy taken captive, conditioned, amputated. Because the power..the power of the citizen, the power of each one of us, is limited, in the political sphere, I repeat, in the political sphere, to remove a government that we do not like and replace it with another one that perhaps we might like in the future. Nothing else. But the big decisions are taken in a different sphere, and we all know which one that is. The big international financial organisations, the IMFs, the World Trade Organisations, the World Banks, the OECDs. All..not one of these entities is democratic. And so, how can we keep talking about democracy, if those who effectively govern the world are not chosen democratically by the people? Who chooses the representatives of each country in those organisations? Your respective peoples? No. Where then is the democracy?

The management of the New York fiscal crisis pioneered the way for neoliberal practices both domestically under Reagan and internationally through the IMF in the 1980s. It established the principle that in the event of a conflict between the integrity of financial institutions and bondholders’ returns, on the one hand, and the well-being of the citizens on the other, the former was to be privileged.

Something new is blowing. On a downtown Kingston wall: IMF—Is Manley Fault. General election called for October 30, 1980. Somebody is driving you through Bavaria, near the Austrian border. A hospital sprouting out of the forest like magic. Hills in the background tipped with snow like cake icing. You meet the tall and frosty Bavarian, the man who helps the hopeless. He smiles but his eyes are set too far back and they vanish in the shadow of his brow. Cancer is a red alert that the whole body is in danger, he says. Thank God the food he forbids, Rastafari had forbidden long time. A sunrise is a promise. Something new is blowing. November 1980. A new party wins the general election and the man who killed me steps up to the podium with his brothers to take over the country. He has been waiting for so long he leaps up the stairs and trips.

Once you understand the process of corporate globalization, you have to see that what happened in Argentina, the devastation of Argentina by the IMF, is part of the same machine that is destroying Iraq. Both are efforts to break open and to control markets. And so Argentina is destroyed by the chequebook, and Iraq is destroyed by the cruise missile. If the chequebook won't work, the cruise missile will. Hell hath no fury like a market scorned.

The minimalist role of national governments in housing supply has been reinforced by current neo-liberal economic orthodoxy as defined by the IMF and the World Bank. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed upon debtor nations in the late 1970s and 1980s required a shrinkage of government programs and, often, the privatization of housing markets. However, the social state in the Third World was already withering away even before SAPs sounded the death knell for welfarism.

Making women into small business owners, factory workers, and heads of households, not participants & leaders of collective social movements or activists demanding more accountability of the World Trade Organization, the IMF or the World Bank, these institutions maintain control over the economic growth and development of these countries and provide access to cheap labor, mineral resources, and military bases for the global north while the women themselves remain at or below poverty level.

We mostly control this money, but our real influence consists of the huge debts we basically force upon all governments in order to deal with the economy, and therefore in the social field — in the way we like it. This is basically the main target for which we founded two high financial structures in the world: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But the strongest stroke which made our greatest success was getting the USA into debt so that they completely fall under the financial politics we arrange. 

Forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. Greece was never bailed out. With their ‘rescue’ loan and their troika of bailiffs enthusiastically slashing incomes, the EU and IMF effectively condemned Greece to a modern version of the Dickensian debtors’ prison and then threw away the key. Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency. Why? Did the EU and the IMF not realize what they were doing? They knew exactly what they were doing. Despite their meticulous propaganda, in which they insisted that they were trying to save Greece, to grant the Greek people a second chance, to help reform Greece’s chronically crooked state and so on, the world’s most powerful institutions and governments were under no illusions. […] Banks restructure the debt of stressed corporations every day, not out of philanthropy but out of enlightened self-interest. But the problem was that, now that we had accepted the EU–IMF bailout, we were no longer dealing with banks but with politicians who had lied to their parliaments to convince them to relieve the banks of Greece’s debt and take it on themselves. A debt restructuring would require them to go back to their parliaments and confess their earlier sin, something they would never do voluntarily, fearful of the repercussions. The only alternative was to continue the pretence by giving the Greek government another wad of money with which to pretend to meet its debt repayments to the EU and the IMF: a second bailout.

Còn các nhà tài phiệt ngân hàng quốc tế bắt tay với IMF đã giăng lưới đợi sẵn con mồi. IMF đưa ra một loạt các điều kiện viện trợ hà khắc đồng thời ép buộc các quốc gia phát triển đang rệu rã vì nợ nần kia phải uống "bốn liều thốc của IMF": tư hữu hóa các nguồn tài sản cơ bản của quốc gia, tự do hóa thị trường vốn, thị trường hóa các yếu tố sinh hoạt cơ bản và quốc tế hóa mậu dịch tự do. Một khi đã uống thứ thuốc này rồi, phần lớn các quốc gia nếu không tắc tử thì cũng ngắc ngoải, cá biệt có những quốc gia có tiềm lực mạnh cũng rơi vào cảnh nguyên khí tổn hại nặng, dân nghèo nước yếu.

Peace, Inc., is sometimes as worrying and War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it. The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against "corruption" and for "transparency." They want the Rule of Law--as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardise a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment. Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely--unimpeded--around the world today is money, capital.

WHEN THE TURKISH COMMUNIST WRITER Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, the time of the big purges and show trials, a Soviet apologist trying to convince him about the need for violence against the enemies evoked the proverb “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” to which Istrati tersely replied: “All right. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelet of yours?” We should say the same about the austerity measures imposed by IMF: the Greeks would have the full right to say, “OK, we are breaking our eggs for all of Europe, but where’s the omelet you are promising us?

I remember one session with British Prime Minister James Callaghan, who asked for a conversation that would be totally off the record. We had a cocktail while enjoying the new rocking chairs, and he described Great Britain’s economic troubles and told me that the International Monetary Fund was putting pressure on him to reduce their deficit with what seemed to be draconian actions. I interrupted to offer my help in easing the IMF demands, and he said, “No, no! I want you to support their restraints. I want them to force me and my government to do what I know is right but is not politically popular.

It is often believed that, as long as we’re the economic powerhouse of the world and have a huge military advantage, we can control the world by “owning” international organizations like the United Nations, NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank. These international organizations may also be used as a means to get around congressional oversight and restrictions that Congress and the people might prefer. To a degree, that control has been achieved. But now that the US is the largest debtor nation in the world and in all history, the days of military and economic supremacy are numbered, as are the days of dollar hegemony.

The moment American bankers stop lending dollars to Argentina, the country is unable to refinance its mountain of dollar debt. Again, Greece is similar. Even though it has the same currency as Germany, the euro, the chronic Greek trade deficit with Germany translates into a constant flow of loaned euros from Germany to Greece so that the Greeks can keep buying more and more German goods. The slightest interruption in the flow of new loans from the surplus country to the deficit country causes the whole house of cards to collapse. This is when the IMF steps in. Its personnel fly into Buenos Aires or Athens, take black limousines to the finance minister’s office and state their terms: we shall lend you the missing dollars or euros on condition that you impoverish your people and sell the family silver to our mates, the oligarchs of this country and the world. Or words to that effect. That’s when TV screens fill with images of angry, and often hungry, demonstrators in Buenos Aires or Athens. Time and again history has shown that the periodic economic recessions that result from trade imbalances poison the deficit country’s democracy, incite contempt for its people in the surplus country, which then prompts xenophobia in the deficit country. Simply put, sustained trade deficits – and surpluses, their mirror image – never end well.

The danger, of course, is that it is not always easy to distinguish between a default that was inevitable—in the sense that a country is so highly leveraged and so badly managed that it takes very little to force it into default—and one that was not—in the sense that a country is fundamentally sound but is having difficulties sustaining confidence because of a very temporary and easily solvable liquidity problem. In the heat of a crisis, it is all too tempting for would-be rescuers (today notably multilateral lenders such as the IMF) to persuade themselves that they are facing a confidence problem that can be solved with short-term bridge loans, when in fact they are confronting a much more deeply rooted crisis of solvency and willingness to pay

The “United States” does not exist as a nation, because the ruling class of the U.S./Europe exploits the world without regard to borders and nationality.  For instance, multinational or global corporations rule the world.  They make their own laws by buying politicians– Democrats and Republicans, and white politicians in England and in the rest of Europe.  We are ruled by a European power which disregards even the hypocritical U.S. Constitution.  If it doesn’t like the laws of the U.S., as they are created, interpreted and enforced, the European power simply moves its base of management and labor to some other part of the world.   Today the European power most often rules through neocolonial regimes in the so-called “Third World.”  Through political leaders who are loyal only to the European power, not to their people and the interests of their nation, the European power sets up shop in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  By further exploiting the people and stealing the resources of these nations on every continent outside Europe, the European power enhances its domination.  Every institution and organization within the European power has the purpose of adding to its global domination: NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the military, and the police.   The European power lies to the people within each “nation” about national pride or patriotism.  We foolishly stand with our hands over our hearts during the “National Anthem” at football games while the somber servicemen in their uniforms hold the red, white and blue flag, then a military jet flies over and we cheer.  This show obscures the real purpose of the military, which is to increase European power through intimidation and the ongoing invasion of the globe.  We are cheering for imperialist forces.  We are standing on Native land celebrating the symbols of de-humanizing terrorism.  Why would we do this unless we were being lied to?   The European imperialist power lies to us about its imperialism.  It’s safe to say, most “Americans” do not recognize that we are part of an empire.  When we think of an empire we think of ancient Rome or the British Empire.  Yet the ongoing attack against the Native peoples of “North America” is imperialism.  When we made the “Louisiana Purchase” (somehow the French thought Native land was theirs to sell, and the U.S. thought it was ours to buy) this was imperialism.  When we stole the land from Mexico, this was imperialism (the Mexican people having been previously invaded by the European imperialist power).  Imperialism is everywhere.  Only the lies of capitalism could so effectively lead us to believe that we are not part of an empire.

To enable lending to proceed when the IMF’s sustainability criteria were not met, its bureaucrats designed the “systemic risk waiver.” It was a model of circular reasoning that might well be taught to philosophy students. “Severe debt crises all carry the risks of systemic spillovers,” notes Schadler. The global financial system was deemed to be endangered if a debt payment was missed or a haircut imposed on bondholders, because “confidence” was threatened. Any haircut for bondholders might cause panic and “contagion.” So it doesn’t matter what IMF economists say regarding debt sustainability. The IMF is committed to preserving “confidence” at all costs – confidence that the troika will lend governments enough to pay their bondholders and speculators in full (but not pension funds). The systemic risk waiver means that no bondholder should lose. Labor and taxpayers must pay for the losses from risky loans, or else there will be “contagion.

According to the corporate media, which allows all shades of opinion from the far right to the middle-of-the-road, America has vicious enemies on all continents (except maybe Antarctica). These Evildoers, driven by Satan, want to destroy us and take all we own. Hence, by this analysis, our president must have no compunction about spilling blood; in short, like it or not, he must have the soul--or soullessness--of a serial killer. A rival "leftish" view, banned from the corporate media but widely available on Internet, holds that the world does not consist entirely of endless enemies, but does contain many, many peoples who want to get out from under the heel of the IMF, the World Bank and the multi-nationals. "Our" government, in this view, actually belongs not to us but to these giant money-cows, who finance the two major parties and ensure that no third party ever gets decent coverage in their media. The government then acts as Company Cop for the rich, suppressing all attempts at rebellion or national liberation, etc. Thus, once again, via a dissenting ideology, we arrive at the conclusion that the president must think, feel and act like a serial killer.

These are a substantial number of “they” who once a year meet to deliberate the fate of national economies and, hence, entire populations. Many of them also believe in the mandate of eugenics, the practice of improving the human race to include reducing the population. Know that we do not have the names of every attendee. Only those who authorize the release of their names get mentioned in the public media. Daniel Estulin, author of The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, wrote that the group’s membership and meeting participants have represented a “who’s who” of the world power elite with familiar names like David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Lloyd Blankfein, George Soros, Donald Rumsfeld, Rupert Murdoch, other heads of state, influential senators, congressmen, and parliamentarians, Pentagon and NATO brass, members of European royalty, selected media figures, and invited others. Such invitees have included President Obama along with many of his top officials. Estulin said that also represented at Bilderberg meetings are leading figures from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), IMF, World Bank, the Trilateral Commission, EU, and powerful central bankers from the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Bank of England. David Rockefeller, the head of the Rockefeller family financial empire, is believed to have been a leading Bilderberg attendee for years. Other wealthy elite members merely send representatives.

As for the Economy, this new embodiment as I called it of Fate or the Gods, this global power that governs the lives of Chinese workers in village factories, Brazilian miners, children working cocoa plantations in West Africa, sex workers in Mumbai, real estate salesmen in Connecticut, sheep-farmers in Scotland or on the Darling Downs, disembodied voices in call centres in Bangalore, workers in the hospitality industry in Cancun or Venice or Fiji, keeping them fatefully interconnected, in its mysterious way, by laws that do exist, the experts assure us, though they cannot agree on what they are- it is too impersonal, too implacable for us to live comfortably with, or even to catch hold of and defy. When we were in the hands of the Gods, we had stories that made these distant beings human and brought them close. They got angry, they took our part or turned violently against us. They fell in love with us and behaved badly. They had their own problems and fought with one another, and like us were sometimes foolish. But their interest in us was personal. They watched over us and were concerned though in moments of willfulness or boredom they might also torment us as “wanton boys” do flies. We had our ways of obtaining their help as intermediaries. We could deal with them. The Economy is impersonal. It lacks manageable dimensions. We have discovered no mythology to account for its moods. Our only source of information about it, the Media and their swarm of commentators, bring us “reports,” but these do not help: a possible breakdown in the system, a new crisis, the descent of Greece, or Ireland or Portugal, like Jove’s eagle, of the IMF. We are kept in a state of permanent low-level anxiety broken only by outbreaks of alarm.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank’s, “Four Step Strategy,” which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarise this below, 1. Privatisation. This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple. 2. Capital Market Liberalization. This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, “hot money,” cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse. The nation then requires International Monetary Fund (IMF) help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries. 3. Market Based Pricing. This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, “IMF Riots.” These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices. 4. Free Trade. This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease.

As I saw it, there was a 75 percent chance the Fed’s efforts would fall short and the economy would move into failure; a 20 percent chance it would initially succeed at stimulating the economy but still ultimately fail; and a 5 percent chance it would provide enough stimulus to save the economy but trigger hyperinflation. To hedge against the worst possibilities, I bought gold and T-bill futures as a spread against eurodollars, which was a limited-risk way of betting on credit problems increasing. I was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed’s efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history. How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors’ committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years. My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.

The management of the New York fiscal crisis pioneered the way for neoliberal practices both domestically under Reagan and internationally through the IMF (international monetary fund) in the 1980s. It established the principle that in the event of a conflict between the integrity of financial institutions , on one hand , and the well-being of the citizens on the other, the former was to be privileged .it emphasized that the role of the government was to create a good business climate rather than look to the needs and well-being of the popualtion at large.

A standard IMF package often involves, among other things, the following “conditionalities”: 1) devaluation of currency; 2) tight monetary and fiscal constraints; 3) budget cuts, with sharply reduced public expenditures; 4) a wage freeze; and 5) sharp reduction or elimination of import and price subsidies.

IMF is really designed to protect creditors not debtors.

work on a dollar replacement had already been discussed in Europe and China and at the IMF.

Central banks across the globe have been hesitant to recognize bitcoin as a form of money, and Tuesday’s vanishing act isn’t helping. Mt. Gox “reminds us of the downside of decentralized, unregulated currencies,” said Campbell Harvey, a professor at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business who specializes in financial markets and global risk management. “There is no Federal Reserve or IMF to come to the rescue. There is no deposit insurance.” However, Campbell said, Mt. Gox’s disappearance “doesn’t mean the end of the road” for bit-coin and other virtual currencies.

경제개발 정보이용료결제( O1O.5925.2207 )폰캐시 = pcash.net =을 시작한 1960년대 이래로 고도성장을 지속해왔으나, 경제규모의 확대와 대외 여건의 악화로 1990년대 중반 이후부터 경제성장률이 점차 둔화되기 시작하였다. 1994년, 1995년 중 9%에 가까웠던 경제성장률은 1996년 7%, 1997년 상반기 6%대로 서서히 낮아졌으며, 경상수지 적자 또한 1995년 85억 달러에서 1996년 230억 달러로 크게 확대되었다. 1997년 상반기에는 경상수지 적 자 축소 노력에 힘입어 전년 같은 기간에 비해 적자 규모가 줄어들었음에도 여전히 99억 달러의 적자를 보이는 등 실물부문의 침체가 조금씩 가시화되고 있었다. 특히 1997년 1월 한보그룹의 부도를 시작으 로 삼미,진로,대농,한신공영,해태,뉴코아,기아그룹 등이 연이어 부도처리되거나 부도유예협약을 적용 받게 되면서 금융회사 부실규모의 급속한 정보이용료결제( O1O.5925.2207 )폰캐시 = pcash.net =증가로 이어지고 있었다. 이에 불안을 느낀 외국인의 주식투 자 자금이 국외로 유출되었고, 외국은행들도 국내기업과 금융회사에 빌려줬던 돈을 회수해 감에 따라 환 율·금리가 급등하였으며 주가는 큰 폭으로 하락하는 등 우리경제 전반에 걸쳐 기업·금융·외환시장에 부정적인 여건이 급속도로 확대되기 시작하였다. 특히 1997년 말에는 대외신인도 악화로 만기도래한 해외부문 채무에 대한 만기연장(Rollover) 이 어려워지고 외환보유고가 급감함에 따라 외채상환이 사실상 불가능해졌다. 이에 따라 정부는 금 융·외환부문의 문제를 스스로 처리하기 곤란하다고 판단하고 1997년 12월 3일 국제통화기금(IMF: International Monetary Fund)으로부터 긴급유동성 자금지원을 받기로 하였다. 그리고 자금지원 조건으로 긴축기조의 거시정책 유지 및 정보이용료결제( O1O.5925.2207 )폰캐시 = pcash.net =금융구조 개혁, 자본·무역 자유화, 기업 재무구조 개선 등의 정 책 프로그램 실시와 관련한 합의사항을 발표하였다.

we proposed to substantially reduce the loans of the IMF and the World Bank to the poorest countries, and to write off the U.S. government loans entirely over time. We also proposed some creative conditions. To qualify for debt relief, governments would have to divert the money they saved on interest payments into health care and other services for their people.

The IMF was a more formal and less fun place to work than Treasury. The meetings were endless, with crushing bureaucracy, an intrusive and fractious executive board, an appalling amount of paper, and a lot of factional conflict among various fiefdoms.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has just warned Turkey to implement structural reforms to reduce its dependence on foreign investors.

The Rebel, Within the Rubble From the rubble, arises the rebel, Embarking on the freedom struggle. Lost and frustrated, survival is slim Yet the fire of the cause burns from within Our people melt, our people burn Our people shelled, our stomachs churn The world is cold, the world is grim Our people hang, on their last limb Billions more, from the IMF Don’t hear our cries, cos they claim deaf Rape, torture, and abusive camps Thamils die in government clamps 1400 now die in a camp each week All because of the language we speak Each day I wake up, more havoc they wreak Each day I wake up, the situation looks bleak The Phoenix arises, from the ashes This Phoenix surmises, previous clashes Beware of our youth, they burn with the truth Merciless, and furious, you will get the boot The Eelam pride, I will never hide, The Thamil side, is forever my guide The Tigers died, with cyanide They collide, for us to reside, In the land where we were denied Forevermore, they have cried, Forevermore, we’ll bring this worldwide! Thamilarin Thaagam, Thamileela Thayagam!

We also proposed an interesting design for the new fund. Instead of raising the money exclusively from the traditional group of advanced economies, we proposed that emerging markets should help finance it and help govern it. This was partly to reflect the new global balance of power; the rising Asian and South American economies deserved a more influential presence alongside rich establishment nations at the IMF. But it was partly to dilute the power of more conservative European countries; we didn’t want their occasional parochialism and moral hazard fundamentalism to paralyze future crisis responses.

The IMF, despite its weaknesses, was a vital institution, designed to be as detached as possible from the politics of its member nations. And while we didn’t control it, as some claimed, we cared a lot about its ability to defuse crises around the world.

Speaking at the end of the summit, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said countries will hold each other accountable by monitoring implementation of their commitments to boost growth. The G-20, criticized in recent years as being all talk and no action, was urged to deliver measurable results this year. Perhaps in response, the group said the International Monetary Fund will also play a role in monitoring progress and estimating the economic benefits of the growth plan. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde dismissed concerns that countries might fudge their growth figures, saying the monitoring is a thorough and detailed process. “We’ll make sure they keep their feet to the fire,” she said. The G-20 communique says that if the $2 trillion initiative is fully implemented, it will lift global GDP by 2.1 percent above expected levels by 2018 and create millions of jobs.

Colonel Sanders as played by Hot Daddy Harrison Ford, cracking the whip on some island plantation, topping every native boy, stopping only long enough to enjoy a refreshing Coca Cola. Because every white guy is a blonde, Aryan top. All of us are the Christian Soldiers of Capitalism that flew TWA into your country, depositing AIDs in your brothels and IMF loans in your banks.

The IMF has lowered its forecast for China’s economy this year from 7.1 per cent growth to 6.8 per cent, in large part because of the slowdown in property and investment.

After a change in methodology last year, the World Bank and IMF estimated China’s economy would surpass that of the US in 2014 in terms of purchasing power parity.

Naturally, most analysts expected that U.S. taxpayers would pay an astronomical price to repair our financial system, too. Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, warned that the government’s price tag could be $1 trillion to $2 trillion, “in line with the experience” of other nations. An IMF study estimated the final tab at nearly $2 trillion. “If we spent a million dollars a day every day since the birth of Christ, we wouldn’t get to $1 trillion,” said Congressman Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House government oversight committee. “And we’re likely to lose far more than that.” But we didn’t.

As late as April 2009, the IMF estimated that we would incur nearly $2 trillion in direct costs saving the financial system, but at the end of 2013, our financial programs were projected to generate a positive return for the taxpayer of more than $150 billion, enough to fund federal cancer research at current levels for the next twenty-five years. But many Americans just remember the initial characterization of the financial rescue as a handout. Jenni LeCompte once sent me a clip of CNN’s Erin Burnett interviewing a young activist from Occupy Wall Street, asking him if he knew that the Wall Street bailouts had been profitable for taxpayers.

In early 2009, the IMF estimated that the U.S. government would end up spending nearly $2 trillion rescuing the financial system. In fact, the U. S. government’s crisis response not only prevented the collapse of the financial system and helped revive the broader economy, but as of the end of 2013 it was projected to generate about $166 billion in positive returns for taxpayers.

She was determined to guard against moral hazard and protect the FDIC insurance fund. She saw this as a teachable moment, a chance to show the world that the irresponsibility of WaMu and its bondholders would be punished. She made the same argument the Germans and other moral hazard critics had made against IMF assistance during the emerging-market crises: It will only encourage bad behavior in the future.

The new tactics were evident in the negotiations between Gorbachev and President George H. W. Bush in Malta (November 1989). Gorbachev’s amiability and willingness to make arms concessions was not related so much to a desire to lower the burden of military expenditures. That was strategically important but politically difficult. It would take time for the reduction in military spending to influence the economic situation in the USSR. Something else was of critical significance for the Soviets: the willingness of the United States and its allies to support government loans to the USSR, loans from the IMF and World Bank. For the Soviets, this was fundamental. In order to improve their chances of getting the money, they provided informal assurances that the USSR would not use force to maintain its political control in Eastern Europe.11

The income of the world’s 500 richest people exceeds the cumulative income of the world’s 416 million poorest people. —UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

In my view, Greek distrust is rooted in politics, particularly in the absence of a strong, impartial state, but over the years it has perpetuated itself as a cultural habit. Distrust has been pervasive in both traditional rural Greek society and in the bitter political struggles of the twentieth century. Greeks have been divided by family, kinship, region, class, and ideology, despite the fact that Greece is one of the world’s most ethnically homogeneous societies. Feeding these social and political cleavages is the fact that the state has never been seen as the protector of an abstract public interest, in the manner of the German and French states. Rather, it is seen as an asset to be grabbed and exploited for narrow partisan benefit. Hence, no contemporary Greek political party has made reform of the state itself part of its agenda. When the European Union and the IMF demanded structural reforms in return for a restructuring of Greek debt, the Greek government was willing to consider virtually any form of austerity before agreeing to end party control over patronage.

currency, interest rates, already 20%, will rise further. That will make it more difficult to repay loans. Added to all that is government austerity, on which the IMF is insisting. By 2017 domestic gas prices will have increased to five times the level of 2013. The government is freezing pensions. With such high inflation, that amounts to a substantial cut. Even if the war stopped tomorrow, there would be a lot more pain to come.

Table 1: USA Foreign Policy and Actions — Choices, Options, and Alternatives Assassinations, death squads, and drones Bounties for info/capture Bribery, blackmail, and entrapment Celebration of national “morality” and necessity of torture Collaboration/contracts with universities, scientists, professional organizations Contingent “humanitarian” aid Contingent foreign aid Control UN via vetoes Control IMF and World Bank Cooperate with foreign nations (e.g., military, intelligence) Development of domestic crowd controls (e.g., militarization of police) Diplomacy Drug wars and corruptions Disproportionate support of “allies” and enemification of others Establishment of military bases (more than 900 known foreign bases) Exportation of popular American culture Foreign student/faculty/consultant exchanges Fund development of disguised/pseudo-organizations

After the dismissal of Hamrouche and until 1999, the state underwent a severe financial crisis and was on the verge of stopping all payments. Loans had to be negotiated with international financial institutions, particularly with the IMF, which required a structural adjustment program. State finances were saved by credits from the IMF and the European Union. Algerian negotiators, who played on the fear of the European states about the Islamist threat, said in effect, “It’s either us, with all our defects, or an Islamist republic just one hour’s flight from Europe.” Alarmed to the point of panic, the West paid up without any conditions on how their credits were to be used. Policy thereafter fluctuated between rhetoric and laxity in letting deficits mount.

During the past quarter of a century, most developing countries have liberalized trade to a huge degree. They were first pushed by the IMF and the World Bank in the aftermath of the Third World debt crisis of 1982. There was a further decisive impetus towards trade liberalization following the launch of the WTO in 1995. During the last decade or so, bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) have also proliferated.Unfortunately, during this period, developing countries have not done well at all, despite (or because of, in my view) massive trade liberalization,

An analysis last year by the IMF showed that India’s corporate sector has a higher level of debt relative to equity than that of any other emerging market, bar Brazil.

Whil e almost all of the activities of the IMF and the World Bank today are in the developing world (certainly, all of their lending), they are led by representatives from the industrialized nations. (By custom or tacit agreement the head of the IMF is always a European, that of the World Bank an American.) They are chosen behind closed doors, and it has never even been viewed as a prerequisite that the head should have any experience in the developing world. Th e institutions are not representative of the nations they serve.

Within weeks of his arrival, the planet was hit by the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis posed a conundrum for Lin: Officials from the United States, Europe, and the IMF called on China to raise the value of its currency, to boost the buying power of Chinese consumers and make products from other countries relatively cheaper. Sen. Charles Schumer, Democrat from New York, told reporters, “China’s currency manipulation is like a boot to the throat of our recovery.” But Lin saw the issue very differently. Forcing China to raise its currency “won’t help this imbalance and can deter the global recovery,” he told an audience in Hong Kong, arguing that such a move would only depress U.S. consumer demand, because raising the value of the currency would make Chinese exports more expensive, and it would not help the U.S. economy, because Americans don’t produce many of the things they buy from China.

Only after Eden agreed to leave Egypt unconditionally did Eisenhower arrange a billion-dollar rescue package from the IMF and the Export-Import Bank.

•​The IMF's primary purpose is to ensure the stability of the international monetary system—the system of exchange rates and international payments that enables countries (and their citizens) to transact with each other. The Fund's mandate was updated in 2012 to include all macroeconomic and financial sector issues that bear on global stability.

We have reached the point where even some of the central institutions have been forced to admit, however quietly, that this is indeed the case. In America, the Federal Reserve floated a plan for mass mortgage relief in the summer of 2012, only to discover the political class was simply unwilling to consider it. For a while, even the IMF, under Dominique Strauss-Kahn, began trying to reposition itself as the conscience of global capitalism, issuing warnings that if the economy continues on the present course, some kind of crash is inevitable, and the next time, no bailout is likely to be forthcoming: the public simply will not stand for it, and as a result, everything really will come apart. “IMF Warns Second Bailout Would ‘Threaten Democracy,’ ” reads one headline.16 (Of course by “democracy” they mean “capitalism.”) Surely it means something that even those who feel they are responsible for keeping the current global economic system running, who just a few years ago acted as if they could simply assume the current system would be around forever, are now seeing apocalypse everywhere.

After World War II, America did set the broad directions for the liberal international order (which should be more appropriately called the “rules-based international order”). The main global multilateral institutions, including the UN, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, were all created at the height of American power. They reflect American values. In terms of cultural identity, they are Western in orientation, not Asian or Chinese.

In Latin America and Africa in the eighties, it was a debt crisis that forced countries to be “privatized or die,” as one former IMF official put it.

There is striking evidence—now gathered and acknowledged by the OECD and IMF—that economies with more equal distributions of income and wealth have stronger and more stable economic growth than those with greater inequality.56 Redistributive policies which reduce inequality are found to have in general a positive impact on growth.57

global and national economic turmoil, China has not experienced a hard or soft landing, but rather, no landing at all. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), China has maintained blazing hot growth for decades. Astonishingly, between 1953 and 2017, China registered in excess of 5% GDP growth for all but 10 of those 65 years and, between 1983 and 2007, China registered GDP growth in excess of 10% for 14 of those 25 years.[34]

The World Bank, which had become the developing world’s single largest source of healthcare financing, considered free public health programs a thing of the past, and so required debtor countries to decentralize their health services and encourage privately run clinics and hospitals to sell health care to those consumers willing to pay.5 In Zaire, more than eighty thousand clinicians and teachers were fired under World Bank and IMF strictures in a single year. In Zambia, within just two years of such programs, infant mortality rose by 25 percent while life expectancy dropped from fifty-four to forty years.6

All this is merely internal Labour Party politics of course. And Labour Party politics in opposition at that. The real power of the state, as opposed to the skirmishing line of the establishment which is the Labour right, will be deployed later. We have not yet even seen the forces that were deployed to stop Scotland voting Yes in the referendum. There has been no public statement by the banks and the bosses of the supermarkets, no speech by the Governor of the Bank of England, no moment when the politically neutral Queen ‘lets her views be known’~all of which happened during the referendum campaign. Nor, since a Corbyn led Labour Party is still a long way from government, has there been the kind of moment where the governor of the Bank of England tells a Labour prime minister to dump his economic policy, as Lord Cromer instructed Harold Wilson in the 1960s, or where the IMF imposes austerity, as it did on an all too willing Denis Healy in the late 1976s. Anyone who wants an analysis of how this will all work can still do no better than read two books by Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. Or to read how the left wing rapture for former Nye Bevan supporter Harold Wilson turned to despair there is no better account than the one written by Paul Foot. For a contemporary example of the same disastrous process we need look no further than the defenestration of Tsipris’ Syriza in Greece. These are endgames, not the immediate prospect of the coming months. But they should warn us that we need to prepare alternatives now and not allow the excitement of current advance to blind us to the real dangers ahead. They should also serve to warn us that if we are to avoid these dangers it will be mass movements and political organisations outside the Labour Party which will play a decisive role.

To manage the new US-dominated Bretton Woods system, new institutions were created: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, with the US controlling the majority of voting rights within each and thus their policies.

Interestingly, even the IMF, so long the bastion of growth-first orthodoxy, now recognizes that sacrificing the poor to promote growth was bad policy. It now requires its country teams to include inequality in factors to take into consideration when providing policy guidance to countries and outlining conditions under which they can receive IMF assistance.123

That is the untold story of what the IMF calls "stabilization programs," as if countries were ships being tossed around on the market's high seas. They do, eventually, stabilize, but that new equilibrium is achieved by throwing millions of people overboard: public sector workers, small-business owners, subsistence farmers, trade unionists. The ugly secret of "stabilization" is the vast majority never climb back aboard. They end up in slums, now home to 1 billion people; they end up in brothels or cargo ship containers. They are the disinherited, those described by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke as "ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs.

Even outside the EEC, global trade grew as new multilateral organizations like the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs pushed for lower import tariffs across the world. The IMF helped, monitoring exchange rates so that no country attempted to get an undue advantage from the increased openness by depreciating its exchange rate and exporting more—the “beggar-thy-neighbor” strategy that was much feared during the Great Depression.

P. C. Bhattacharya was the first non-ICS man to be appointed to the job and he had a soft ride. But in what would cause a major uproar today in Parliament and in the media, when the rupee was devalued by a huge 36 per cent in 1966, he was merely informed. The decision had been taken by Indira Gandhi in March that year when she visited the United States and met the representatives of the World Bank and IMF. But she kept it to herself till June. Even the finance minister didn’t know, let alone the poor RBI governor.

Taking her cue from the points I had made, Christine seconded my appeals for debt relief and lower tax rates as prerequisites for a Greek recovery. Then she addressed me with calm and gentle honesty: You are of course right, Yanis. These targets that they insist on can’t work. But, you must understand that we have put too much into this programme. We cannot go back on it. Your credibility depends on accepting and working within this programme.2 So, there I had it. The head of the IMF was telling the finance minister of a bankrupt government that the policies imposed upon his country couldn’t work. Not that it would be hard to make them work. Not that the probability of them working was low. No, she was acknowledging that, come hell or high water, they couldn’t work. With

There is a major economic difference, however, between now and 1991, much less 1950. At the start of the Cold War in 1950, the United States produced around 27 percent of world output. As of 1991, when the Cheney-Wolfowitz dreams of U.S. dominance were taking shape, that figure was around 22 percent. By now, according to IMF estimates, the U.S. share is 16 percent, while China has surpassed the United States at 18 percent.6 By 2021, according to IMF projections, the United States will produce 15 percent of global output compared with China’s 20 percent.

As wars have become less common, nuclear weapons have proved to be a major deterrent among major powers, and as regional conflicts and ethnic troubles bordering civil war have increased, the content of international relations has considerably changed. Besides, with the increasing role of trade and financial relations and of institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the study of international relations has become increasingly interdisciplinary, and politics and economy have become closely related inputs of our subject.

The Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was the chief economist of the World Bank at the time, called the food riots in Indonesia “the IMF Riots.” “When a nation is down and out,” Stiglitz told the London newspaper the Observer, “the IMF takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until finally the whole cauldron blows

PV did nothing in 1991 that had not already been suggested by someone or the other at home. To that extent they were home-grown. But it is also true that the implementation of many of these reforms was a policy conditionality imposed by the IMF as a quid pro quo for the balance of payments support India sought from it.

the IMF, World Bank and donor governments was implemented. PV picked and chose what he felt he could reasonably defend within his own party and Parliament. It was his ‘middle way’. It is useful to

Today's rich countries used protection and subsidies, while discriminating against foreign investors-all anathema to today's economic orthodoxy and now severely restricted by multilateral treaties, like the WTO agreements, and proscribed by aid donors and international financial organizations (notably the IMF and the World Bank). There are a few countries that did not use much protection, such as the Netherlands and (until the First World War) Switzerland. But they deviated from the orthodoxy in other ways, such as their refusal to protect patents. The records of today's rich countries on policies regarding foreign investment, state-owned enterprises, macroeconomic management and political institutions also show significant deviations from today's orthodoxy regarding these matters.

As for Africa, its per capita income grew relatively slowly even in the 1960s and t he 1970s (1-2% a year). But since the 1980s, the region has seen a fall in living standards. This record is a damning indictment of the neoliberal orthodoxy, because most of the African economies have been practically run by the IMF and the World Bank over the past quarter of a century.

Her name was Africa. His name was IMF. He set her up to be pillaged, to go without health care, to starve.

The IMF was a predatory force, opening developing countries up to economic assaults from the wealthy North and powerful transnational corporations.

These rules meant that, unlike Britain, the United States was able to pursue its Cold War spending in Asia and elsewhere in the world without constraint, as well as social welfare spending at home. This was just the reverse of Britain’s stop–go policies or the austerity programs that the IMF imposed on Third World debtors when their balance of payments fell into deficit.

The United States is in deficit on raw materials account, but is unwilling to limit its industrial expansion correspondingly. It is in surplus on farm products account, but is unwilling to limit its agriculture accordingly. The peoples of developing countries therefore are to be turned into the instrument through which the otherwise untenable U.S. economic process is perpetuated.

The easy kind of liberalism, with its hope for ready-to-hand technocratic solutions to social problems, has led them to support the major way in which liberal institutions among backward peoples can be prevented from evolving. Their support for higher living standards for all has been exploited into de facto support of the oppressive and militarist regimes in backward countries. That indeed has become the purpose of the Malthusianism promoted by the World Bank and the government of the United States. American liberals have been its unwitting allies, and thereby the allies of the world’s most reactionary regimes.

it was loans from oil-rich Venezuela that allowed Argentina to pay off its IMF loans early so that it could set its own saner economic policies.

People such as Larry Summers and the technocrats at the IMF may have been furious at the Russian government for being so arrogant, but they knew a disorderly sovereign default in Russia would be catastrophic, and at the last minute the United States threw its weight behind a huge bailout package. On July 20 the IMF and World Bank stepped in with $22.6 billion, immediately releasing the first tranche of $4.8 billion.

Likewise, Egypts vaunted economic reform--the mythology embroidered by the IMF and Washington--had also unraveled by the beginning of the new millennium. During 2000. the Cairo stock market collapsed, losing almost 50 percent of its value. By the end of the year share prices were lower than when the government first revived the exchange in 1995. The real estate boom had gone bust. Ahmed Bahgat , the builder of dreamland, suffered a heart attack in July 2000 while on a trip to Washington, where he was part of an official delegation making an unsuccessful effort to encourage investments from large U.S corporations. When news reached Cairo that he was in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland,undergoing surgery to the aorta, shares in his company collapsed. Dreamland was effectively bankrupt. Beverly Hills and most of the other smaller developments also came to a halt, as speculators discovered they had overbuilt and luxury property prices dropped by more than half----Dreamworlds of neoliberalism Evil Paradises

That was what the IMF was for.

Without help from a team of American political consultants and especially without a Clinton-arranged loan from the IMF coming on the eve of the elections, it is very likely that Boris Yeltsin would have lost his bid for re-election in 1996.

Whether in the White House, the Kremlin, the European Union, the UN Security Council, or the IMF, the world cannot afford wolves in the clothing of politics.