When the IMF arrives in a country, they are interested in only one thing. How do we make sure the banks and financial institutions are paid?... It is the IMF that keeps the [financial] speculators in business. They’re not interested in development, or what helps a country to get out of poverty.
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist and former IMF employee, turned whistleblower, quoted in Johann Hari's disturbing piece on what the IMF does to the countries it's supposed to be helping. He's not the first to point out that it's perilously close to what Dominique Strauss-Kahn's been accused of doing to a hotel maid.
It makes grim reading, but there are a couple of good news stories wrapped up in there too. Malawi, by rebelling against the IMF's disasterous policies, moved from being a famine-racked basket case to an exporter of food aid within two years. The Hungarian people kicked out an IMF-friendly government bent on slashing public services to pay off the defecit and elcted one that promised to make the banks, not the people, pay for the banker's crisis. The IMF squealed like a pig, but, guess what, the sky did't fall.
As this is IMF behaving badly, rather Fleet Street's preferred scapegoat, the European Union, I'm expecting the Scum, The Daily Fail, the Torygraph and the other usual suspects in the right-wing press to just ignore the whole issue.
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