>Thanks Doug for setting this list up and assuming the awesome
>responcibilities of moderator. I hope that the task is less irritating
>for you than my forays into moderation.
>At the moment I'm puzzling over the apparent split in views between the
>IMF and World Bank. My feeling is that although this split might be of
>some consequence the reason it looks important is simply that they are so
>close together on policy that any difference looms large against the
>backdrop of near unanaminity and very little 'hope' can be derived from
>this.
As far as I know, the authorities are doing their best to minimize the split, and the most outspoken World Banker, Joseph Stiglitz, has been silenced. But there is an awful lot of IMF-bashing going on in elite circles, from Jagdish Baghwati to George Shultz (have I mangled the spelling of both?). Shultz alomg with Martin Feldstein and the Cato Institute have been bashing the IMF for years, but what's interesting is that they're getting much more press attention for it now. One reason may be that Wall Street is more pissed at the IMF than ever - partly, I hear, because most of the Asian debts are owed by private businesses rather than the public sector (unlike Latin America in the 1980s) - meaning that they don't have sovereign taxing power behind them. If the debtor units go under because of engineered depression, then it's bye-bye loans - they won't be able to hit up the education budget to get repaid.
Doug