Skip Navigation
4 comments

  • As a former senior economist of the IMF once said:

    Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medicine and your bag of tricks to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind's eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples. Mr. Camdessus, the blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name and in the names of your predecessors, and under your official seal.

    You know, when all the evidence is in, there are two types of questions that you and me and others like us will have to answer. The first is this: - will the world be content merely to brand our institution as among the most insidious enemies of humankind? Will our fellow men condemn us thus and let the matter rest? Or will the heirs of those whom we have dismembered in our own peculiar Holocaust clamor for another Nuremberg?

    (Davison Budhoo's IMF resignation letter. PDF, archive.org)

  • No surprises obviously but I had no clue "stabilisation reforms" were a thing:

    stabilisation reforms and their disaggregated conditions appear to have limited impact on poverty. Although stabilisation policies including cutting government spending, raising interest rates, and repaying debts cause economic pain, the IMF sets broad targets on macroeconomic indicators linked to stabilisation reforms, providing the borrower more policy discretion relative to structural reforms

    I had always only heard of structural reforms which mostly include removing government intervention and privatisation of public services which, to no one's surprise, increase poverty and inequality.