>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.
Pretty hard slog to acquire the resources from foreign savings too. Means you have to export to earn the FX to service the debt, which means your whole economic structure is skewed towards serving foreign markets rather than educating, feeding, and housing your own people.
>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...
But the income gap between North and South, or First World and Third, or developed and developing, or metropolitan and peripheral, or imperialist and colonized, or whatever you want to call them, has widened since the Morgan-Belmont days.
Soros has more or less retired to philanthropy and pontificating.
Doug