Chris B. wrote:
>Why cannot the IMF's role be to manage world money?
because that's not how it's presently set up (though of course that might
change). The IMF's job seems to be as a collection agency to protect the
creditors and as a kind of loan-shark: if a country gets into big external
debt or a short-term financial crisis, the IMF comes in with the
much-needed funds (as Brad points out, correctly). Instead of charging high
interest rates as normal loan-sharks do, the IMF takes advantage of the
subject country's duress to impose its vision of economic utopia, usually
in alliance with a lot of rich locals and rich-country creditors. (Some of
the local fans of neoliberalism were also contributors to the initial
crisis and so profit not only from creating the crisis but from its
"solution.")
Now the IMF might become a "world Fed," managing the world's money, but I
think that the US power elite would oppose that. It likes the way the
actual Fed manages things.
BTW, I think the solution to the problem of the IMF (from a poor-country
perspective) is to not borrow internationally and to not open up domestic
capital-fund markets to inflows from abroad. But of course, the IMF and the
rest of the neoliberal holy trinity (the WB and the US Treasury) have
militantly opposed this solution.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
