Have you seen Robert Wade and Frank Veneroso's pieces in NLR 228 and 231? Among other things, they bascially make both of these points, though whether the IMF is austere or munificent depends on your point of view. They argue that the IMF's insistence on capital account liberalization led to the torrential inflows of short-term debt in the cases of South Korea, Thailand, etc. Critics see this, combined with their promise to act as lender of last resort, as an invitation for a speculative carnival. During clean-up, the IMF has had a tendency to treat financial crises as if they were crises of excess demand, so their solutions tend to make local debtors suffer and international lenders off the hook. John Eatwell and Lance Taylor have a good take on the role of lender of last resort (both nat'l and int'l)--and a good explanation of crisis theory--in their book, _Global Finance at Risk_.
All best Christian
>
> "A couple of years ago everyone seemed to agree that the
> international financial institutions needed major reform. Half the critics
> (the Jeffrey Sachs-Joseph Stiglitz wing, with which I tend to agree)
> believed the
> institutions were too scrooge-like: he IMF was forcing countries into
> deflationary policies that caused severe depressions. Half the critics
(the
> Ralph Nader-Wall Street Journal wing) believed the institutions were too
> generous and liberal: the IMF's generosity had encouraged overlending and
> overproduction that had caused widespread crisis. But even though the
> directions of the proposed reforms were directly opposed, everyone seemed
> to agree that such major reforms were absolutely necessary."
>
> Now, could it be that there are other positions? What about agreeing with
> Sachs/Stiglitz but taking the IMF to task for its links to the US
treasury,
> its arch ethnocentric universalism, the particular people it effectively
> gave the money to, and what they did with the money?
>
> I reckon those questions would want answering if we're properly to get to
> this conclusion (and to avoid a pessimist's view that much of what
> apparently worked has neither improved the lives of the working class nor
> solved a tendency to crisis not unlike the '97 disasters.
>
> " ... work needs to be done to rebuild support for a crisis-management
> system that seems--ironically--to have worked relatively well in the past
> decade. And if support cannot be rebuilt, than a new system of crisis
> management that can command broad political support needs to be built in
> its place."
>
>
>
>
>