> >today's ZNet Commentary Delivery from Patrick Bond...
> >
> >* the hard-currency component of Bank and IMF lending is generally
> >not required, and indeed is damaging to balanced development...
>>
If you aren't going to fund your economic development by borrowing from the industrial core, then you do not need a hard-currency crisis lender like the IMF or a hard-currency infrastructure lender like the World Bank.
But acquiring the resources from domestic savings alone is such a hard slog. And once one starts drawing on foreign capital, then you do need a hard-currency crisis lender like the IMF--both for those times when the international capital markets panic, and for those times when the domestic government digs itself into a hole.
I cannot help but believe that in the absence of an IMF, those crisis loans that would be made--as were made back before the IMF by, say, the Morgan-Belmont syndicate in the 1890s--would be smaller in magnitude and carry higher interest rates and more in the way of conditionality than the IMF demands. People who work at the IMF have chosen their jobs in order to DO GOOD. George Soros has chosen his day job to MAKE MONEY...
Brad DeLong