Het Neoliberale Geloof 424

Will the Debtors Fight Back?
The IMF Rules the World
By MICHAEL HUDSON

Not much substantive news was expected to come out of the G-20 meetings
that ended on April 2 in London – certainly no good news was even
suggested. Europe, China and the United States had too deeply distinct
interests. American diplomats wanted to lock foreign countries into further
dependency on paper dollars. The rest of the world sought a way to avoid
giving up real output and ownership of their resources and enterprises for
yet more hot-potato dollars. In such cases one expects a parade of smiling
faces and statements of mutual respect for each others’ position – so
much respect that they have agreed to set up a “study group” or two to
kick the diplomatic ball down the road.

The least irrelevant news was not good at all: The attendees agreed to
quadruple IMF funding to $1 trillion. Anything that bolsters IMF authority
cannot be good for countries forced to submit to its austerity plans. They
are designed to squeeze out more money to pay the world’s most predatory
creditors. So in practice this G-20 agreement means that the world’s
leading governments are responding to today’s financial crisis with
“planned shrinkage” for debtors – a 10 per cent cut in wage payments
in hapless Latvia, Hungary put on rations, and permanent debt peonage for
Iceland for starters. This is quite a contrast with the United States,
which is responding to the downturn with a giant Keynesian deficit spending
program, despite its glaringly unpayable $4 trillion debt to foreign
central banks.

So the international financial system’s double standard remains alive and
kicking – at least, kicking countries that are down or are falling.
Debtor countries must borrow a trillion from the IMF not to revive their
own faltering economies, not to pursue counter-cyclical policies to restore
market demand (that is only for creditor nations), but to pass on the IMF
“aid” to the poisonous banks that have made the irresponsible toxic
loans. (If these are toxic, who put in the toxin? To claim that it was all
the “natural” workings of the marketplace is to say that free markets
curdle and sicken. Is this what is happening?)
Lees verder: http://www.flickr.com/groups/worldpolitics/discuss/72157616430771482/