MB Civic

Weisbrot in The Guardian ..

Now that Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned from his position as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it is worth taking an objective look at his legacy there. Until his arrest last week .. he was widely praised as having changed the IMF, increased its influence and moved it away from the policies that – according to the fund’s critics – had caused so many problems for developing countries in the past .. The biggest changes were in the research department, where there was tolerance for more open debate. For example, there were IMF papers that endorsed the use of capital controls by developing countries under some circumstances, and questioning whether central banks were unnecessarily slowing growth with inflation targets that may be too low. But as can be seen from what is happening in the peripheral Eurozone countries [like Greece], the IMF is still playing its traditional role of applying the medieval economic medicine of “bleeding the patient”.

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