The IMF’s Dwindling Fortunes

[Joanne98]

Thanks to disasters of its own making, the agency is losing money and influence.

by Mark Weisbrot
“The IMF is back,” declared the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at its annual spring meeting earlier this month in Washington. And not a moment too soon either. To hear the organization’s economists tell it (as they mingled in five-star hotels, long black limos and posh restaurants with bankers, businessmen and finance ministers from around the globe), they’ve arrived on the scene just in time to help solve the world’s financial crisis.

But despite the bravado, the reality is that today’s IMF is not what it once was. These days, the world’s most famous deficit police force is running a whopping small-country-size $400-million annual deficit of its own and is being forced into some of the same kinds of “structural adjustments” it used to impose on indebted Third World nations. In just the last four years, the IMF’s total loan portfolio has shrunk from $105 billion to less than $10 billion; over half of the current portfolio consists of loans to Turkey and Pakistan. To cut costs, the agency is reducing staff and closing offices.

The IMF’s loss of influence is probably the most important change in the international financial system in more than half a century. Until just a few years ago, the IMF — originally created at the Bretton Woods conference on international economic cooperation in 1944 — was one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world and the major avenue of influence for the United States in developing countries.

This wasn’t so much a result of the money that it lent — the World Bank loans much more — but because of its position at the top of a hierarchy of official creditors. Until a few years ago, a developing-country government that did not meet IMF conditions risked being economically strangled. The World Bank, regional banks such as the Inter-American Development Bank, rich lender governments and sometimes even the private sector would withhold lending until the government reached agreement with the IMF.

At the top of this powerful creditors cartel sat the U.S. Treasury Department, which holds a formal veto over many of the IMF’s decisions and is an informal power within the organization that marginalizes even the other rich countries. Developing countries — the ones that have historically borne the brunt of IMF decisions — have little or no effective voice in the decision-making of the organization, where the majority of votes of the 185 member nations are assigned to the rich members.

But the IMF lost credibility after presiding over a series of economic disasters. Latin America, for example, suffered its worst long-term growth failure in modern history under the IMF’s tutelage since 1980. The IMF’s “shock therapy” program in Russia vastly underestimated the time it would take to transition from a planned to a capitalist economy in the early ’90s. The result was a lot of shock and no therapy, and tens of millions were pushed into poverty as the economy collapsed.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/27/8550/

[bemildred]

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