Comments on: The Fund in Flux

The Fund in Flux

parmanparman — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 08:25:58 -0800

The Trade Surplus and the Olive Tree The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has seen its loan portfolio drop 73 per cent since 2003. Nobody seems to be defaulting on their loans lately, and there hasn't been a big bailout since 2001. The IMF's summit this week in Singapore will look at this issue and how to better the world balance of trade betweed the developing world and the industrial economies of the west. But is there really a place (warning: PDF) for the IMF in the trade agreements between China and the US?

By: ZenMasterThis

ZenMasterThis — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 08:28:55 -0800

Forget all that, what's Bono going to do with his free time now?

By: gsteff

gsteff — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 09:14:18 -0800

The IMF has faced a raft of criticism in recent years for being more motivated by U.S. interests than those of the nations it assists, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's made some nations more resistant to accepting its loans. I just read Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which tries to argue that the big banks (and the consulting firms they employ) exploit debtor nations basically in two ways. First, by convincing them to accept loans that are much larger than they need (and larger than they can repay) so as to give U.S. (and to a lesser extent the other European countries that influence the big development banks) leverage to later wring political favors. And (more convincingly, to me), by encouraging massive, unnecessary infrastructure investment that both provides lucrative contracts to U.S. corporations and makes the nations technically dependent on them. The book is pretty sensationalistic, and contains virtually no statistics to back its claims up, but it kinda jives with what Joseph Stiglitz wrote a few years ago after the IMF bailouts of Russia and southeast Asia. Anyway, if the IMF tries to start mediating the trade imbalance between the U.S. and China, it won't do so as an unbiased participant.

By: pax digita

pax digita — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 09:23:19 -0800

gsteff, there was a book by (I think) Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies, about 25 years ago that, in part, explained a lot of this -- it seems to be pretty pernicious, and although a lot of us hoped the end of the Cold War would improve things, it seems to have gotten worse.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 10:21:23 -0800

The IMF: Loan Shark to the Developing world. It wouldn't be so bad if they were just loaning money, but the money is tied to implementing half-cocked neo-con ideas about government which end up fucking up countries even worse then they were before, which then impedes their ability to pay.

By: euphorb

euphorb — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:32:15 -0800

Hugo Chavez has begun and proposed a program that could displace the influence of the IMF and break the Washington Consensus, at least in Latin America.

By: sic

sic — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 01:55:05 -0800

The spike in oil prices has allowed Venezuela to help countries like Argentina, Brazil and now Bolivia repay their IMF loans ahead of schedule by giving loans that don't obligate the countries to hand over their economic and social politics to the bloodless bankers at the IMF. This is a signficant shift in power in Latin America.

By: sporb

sporb — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 07:15:46 -0800

I find it striking: the Bretton Woods instruments were deployed to address and correct obvious economic problems, but the obvious idea of the necessary re-deployment of different and better macroeconomic instruments is met with a monkey-like snarling from the partisans who are in control... it's sick, really....