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The American Empire in a Changing World



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Monday, May 23, 2011

IMF: 'Worlds collide in a luxury suite'

from asia times online..............


"The IMF was meant to be a lending institution to help countries develop, but by the 1980s it had become an organization with an ideology - free trade and free-market fundamentalism. It used its loans to gain enormous power over the economies and policies of nations throughout the global South. 

However, if the IMF gained power throughout the 1990s, it began losing that power in the 21st century, thanks to powerful popular resistance to the economic policies it embodied and the economic collapse such policies produced. Strauss-Kahn was brought in to salvage the wreckage of an organization that, in 2008, had to sell off its gold reserves and reinvent its mission. 


t was the IMF that created the economic conditions that destroyed the Argentinian economy by 2001, and it was the revolt against the IMF (among other neoliberal forces) that prompted Latin America's rebirth over the past decade. Whatever you think of Hugo Chavez, it was loans from oil-rich Venezuela that allowed Argentina to pay off its IMF loans early so that it could set its own saner economic policies.

The IMF was a predatory force, opening developing countries up to economic assaults from the wealthy North and powerful transnational corporations. It was a pimp. Maybe it still is. But since the Seattle anti-corporate demonstrations of 1999 set a global movement alight, there has been a revolt against it, and those forces have won in Latin America, changing the framework of all economic debates to come and enriching our imaginations when it comes to economies and possibilities"...............LINK 






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