>[from the stop-imf list at essential.org]
>
>Global drowning- A partner in the marketplace, Asia is taking us down
>By Patrick J. Buchanan, a syndicated columnist.
>
>as published Friday, August 14, 1998, in the San Jose Mercury News
>
>...
>
>What is propping up the Global Economy, preventing a raft of defaults by
>nations awash in debt? First, the bailout billions being shoveled into
>Asia, Russia, Africa and Latin America by the International Monetary
>Fund; second, a humongous U.S. merchandise trade deficit that will come
>in between $275 billion and $300 billion this year alone.
>
>To keep afloat the bankrupt regimes of the Global Economy, U.S. taxpayers
>are being put at risk for scores of billions of dollars in IMF loans that
>will never be repaid, as the U.S. market is flooded with the goods of
>foreign factories that keep producing, only because of those IMF loans.
>America is subsidizing her own decline.
>
Is there a point here?
It's not that the U.S. trade deficit is driving up U.S. unemployment...
It's not that cheap foreign goods are bankrupting American companies...
It's not that corrupt despots are making us Murkans pay through the nose for essential raw mateials...
The only *point* appears to be that the IMF is bad because other countries will default on their IMF loans, and so make IMF loans a way of transferring wealth away from Murkans and to poorer people living in developing countries--a point that leaves me scratching my head in wonder...
And there is no alternative policy recommended: it is as if Buchanan doesn't dare recommend any policy as preferable to Bob Rubin's current one...
Brad DeLong