Imf Related Quotes

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.

Nothing but total capitulation by the Sandinistas would suffice for Reagan. Thus, as the ICJ related, revolutionary leader and then Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega made it clear that he would give in to all of Reagan’s stated demands (i.e., that he would send home the Cuban and Russians advisers and not support the FMLN guerillas in El Salvador) in return for only “one thing: that they don’t attack us, that the United States stop arming and financing … the gangs that kill our people, burn our crops and force us to divert enormous human and economic resources into war when we desperately need them for development.”10 But Reagan would not relent until the Sandinistas and Ortega were out of power altogether. Ultimately, Reagan’s terror campaign would work, with the Nicaraguan people finally crying uncle in 1990, and voting the Sandinistas out of power. The Sandinistas would be voted back in, however, in 2007, and they remain the governing party to this day, with Daniel Ortega as president. Meanwhile, the United States continues to punish Nicaragua, the most stable and prosperous country in Central America after successfully breaking off from US domination, for its impertinence in overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship, having the audacity to survive the Contra War which claimed fifty thousand lives, voting back in the Sandinistas, and for now working with the Chinese to build the canal that the United States has coveted for so long. Thus, as I write these lines, the US Senate is considering passage of the “Nica Act,” already passed by the House, which would cut Nicaragua off from multilateral loans (e.g., from the World Bank, IMF). This, apparently, will show Nicaragua and other countries what they get for deciding to go their own way.

The multilateral institutions that were introduced in the Post World War II period to coordinate international aid – the IMF and the World Bank – have failed in their respective missions. They became agents for the ‘free market’ ideology and through their structural adjustment packages and related policies have made it harder for a nation to develop.

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.

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.

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.

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

At least Japan had sufficient domestic savings to fund its escalating national debt and printed its own currency. Europe’s stricken periphery wasn’t so fortunate. Take Draghi’s homeland. In the fifteen years since the start of the euro project, Italy enjoyed no increase in income per capita and labour costs climbed relative to Germany’s, rendering Italian exports uncompetitive. Italy’s public debt trailed only Japan’s and Greece’s. Italian banks were loaded down with hundreds of billions of euros of bad debts. Many of its largest businesses were certified zombies. Political sclerosis accompanied the economic version. The IMF warned that ‘in the absence of deeper structural reforms, medium-term growth is projected to remain low.’30 Without adequate economic growth, Italy’s sovereign debt problems and the Eurozone’s existential crisis remained unresolved. As in Japan, easy money bought time, but time was wasted.fn6

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.