The IMF Is Utterly Indifferent to the Pain It's Causing

[Judi Lynn]

October 17, 2019 Vijay Prashad



By Vijay Prashad

Each year, the board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gathers at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. This year, the IMF will meet under the leadership of a new chief, Kristalina Georgieva, who crossed the street from the World Bank to take over this post from Christine Lagarde. Lagarde, as it happens, is getting ready to cross the Atlantic Ocean to take over the European Central Bank. There is a game of musical chairs at the top. A handful of bureaucrats seem to waltz in and out of these jobs.

For the past 40 years, the IMF has had the same agenda: to make sure that developing countries adhere to the rules of globalization set by the advanced capitalist states. Sovereignty of these developing countries has become irrelevant, as their governments have to accede to pressure from the IMF on fiscal and monetary policy as well as their trade and development agenda. Any attempt to break the orthodoxy of the IMF is met with a ferocious array of sanctions, including a nod from the IMF toward international creditors not to lend to the country that they determine is a scofflaw. Funds will only flow to distressed countries if they accept the full policy slate developed for them not by their lawmakers, but by the IMF economists in Washington, D.C.

Over these four decades, fires have burned on the streets of the countries that have gone to the IMF and then forced austerity upon their populations. In the 1980s, these uprisings used to be called “IMF riots.” It was clear to everyone that the IMF’s policies had provoked desperate people to take to the streets. The name given to these riots was precise. The emphasis had to be on the IMF and not on the riots themselves. The most famous of these riots took place in Venezuela—the Caracazo of 1989—which opened up a process that brought Hugo Chavez to power and that created the Bolivarian Revolution. It is reasonable to call the Arab Spring of 2011 an IMF riot because it was provoked by IMF austerity policies combined with rising food prices. The current unrest from Pakistan to Ecuador should be filed under IMF riot.

In response to these riots, the IMF has used new language to describe the same old policies. We hear of “social compacts” and of Structural Adjustment 2.0 and then the bizarre “expansionary austerity.” Discussions of gender and environmentalism within the IMF are all to the good, but these are merely words that adorn an entrenched regime of austerity that defines the IMF Article IV Consultations and the IMF Staff Papers. Beneath the smiles lies the skull—a terrible reliance upon policies that are framed by wage cuts and the shrinking of the public sector, by handcuffs on public spending and liberalization for corporations. Sweeter rhetoric does nothing to make the policy framework less harsh.

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[sandensea]

1. And now they're throwing Alejandro Werner under the bus over the Argentine Macrisis

Many in Argentina warned this would happen - just as it did during the last dictatorship in the early 1980s.

They advised Werner that the IMF "bailout" was merely being used by Macri and his friends to dollarize their profits and stash them abroad.

But he wouldn't listen - and Werner's Argentine himself! His parents emigrated to Mexico when he was a child, during the last dictatorship - so he of all people should've understood how right-wing boom-bust policies work in Argentina.

Except with Macri, there was no boom (other than a brief one in Buenos Aires real estate) - just the bust. A massive banking heist just like the one 40 years ago.

But again, Werner was merely the emissary - and the IMF (with Trump behind them) little more than enablers.

This crisis is Macri's baby through and through - his, and his bankster friends'. The IMF was merely the midwife.

The now former IMF Western Hemisphere head Alejandro Werner (middle) pretends to listen to Argentine opposition leader Alberto Fernández (right), who warned Werner in June that the IMF's $57 billion bailout was unpayable.

Not least because it was mostly being used to help the well-connected dollarize assets and then offshore them.

Werner, who was largely dismissive of the warnings, is now out as IMF Western Hemisphere head.

Few, however, see his role in the ongoing Macrisis as anything more than an emissary. The decision to enable Argentina's current debt crisis was taken at the top - reportedly by Trump officials who felt the need to "stem the pink tide" by helping the neo-con Macri stay in power.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

2. I wish there was a way

To shut the fucking IMF down,forever.