{"id":15140,"date":"2015-12-09T08:44:43","date_gmt":"2015-12-09T13:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15140"},"modified":"2015-12-09T08:44:43","modified_gmt":"2015-12-09T13:44:43","slug":"the-imf-joins-the-new-cold-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15140","title":{"rendered":"The IMF Joins the New Cold War"},"content":{"rendered":"

The IMF Joins the New Cold War<\/a><\/h3>\n

On December 8, the IMF\u2019s Chief Spokesman Gerry Rice sent a note saying:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe IMF\u2019s Executive Board met today and agreed to change the current policy on non-toleration of arrears to official creditors. We will provide details on the scope and rationale for this policy change in the next day or so.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since 1947 when it really started operations, the World Bank has acted as a branch of the U.S. Defense Department, from its first major chairman John J. McCloy through Robert McNamara to Robert Zoellick and neocon Paul Wolfowitz. From the outset, it has promoted U.S. exports \u2013 especially farm exports \u2013 by steering Third World countries to produce plantation crops rather than feeding their own populations. (They are to import U.S. grain.) But it has felt obliged to wrap its U.S. export promotion and support for the dollar area in an ostensibly internationalist rhetoric, as if what\u2019s good for the United States is good for the world.<\/p>\n

The IMF has now been drawn into the U.S. Cold War orbit. On Tuesday it made a radical decision to dismantle the condition that had integrated the global financial system for the past half century. In the past, it has been able to take thelead in organizing bailout packages for governments by getting other creditor nations \u2013 headed by the United States, Germany and Japan \u2013 to participate. The creditor leverage that the IMF has used is that if a nation is in financialarrears to any government, it cannot qualify for an IMF loan \u2013 and hence, for packages involving other governments.<\/p>\n

This has been the system by which the dollarized global financial system has worked for half a century. The beneficiaries have been creditors in US dollars.<\/p>\n

But on Tuesday, the IMF joined the New Cold War. It has been lending money to Ukraine despite the Fund\u2019s rules blocking it from lending to countries with no visible chance of\u00a0paying (the \u201cNo More Argentinas\u201d rule from 2001).<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The IMF Joins the New Cold War On December 8, the IMF\u2019s Chief Spokesman Gerry Rice sent a note saying: \u201cThe IMF\u2019s Executive Board met today and agreed to change the current policy on non-toleration of arrears to official creditors. We will provide details on the scope and rationale for this policy change in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2015,149,175,195,10974,1603,418,434],"class_list":["post-15140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-bailout","tag-cold-war","tag-credit","tag-debt","tag-gerry-rice","tag-global-financial-system","tag-imf","tag-international-monetary-fund"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15141,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15140\/revisions\/15141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}