from thefreeonline on October 26, 2023 by TheTriContinental
The Forty-Third Newsletter Read in Español Chinese
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
From 9 to 15 October, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held their annual joint meeting in Marrakech (Morocco).
The last time that these two Bretton Woods institutions met on African soil was in 1973, when the IMF-World Bank meeting was held in Nairobi (Kenya). Kenya’s then President Jomo Kenyatta (1897–1978) urged those gathered to find ‘an early cure to the monetary sickness of inflation and instability that has afflicted the world’.
Kenyatta, who became Kenya’s first president in 1964, noted that, ‘[o]ver the last fifteen years, many developing countries have been losing, every year, a significant proportion of their annual income through deterioration of their terms of trade’.
Developing countries could not overcome the negative terms of trade in a situation where they sold raw materials or barely processed goods on the world market while being reliant on the import of expensive finished commodities and energy, even if they raised their volumes of export.
‘Recently’, Kenyatta added, ‘inflation in the industrial countries has led to further and important losses to the developing countries’.
‘The whole world is watching’, Kenyatta said. ‘This is not because many people understand the details of what you are discussing, but because the world looks to you to find urgent solutions to problems affecting their daily lives’.
Kenyatta’s warnings went unheeded.
Six decades after the meeting in Nairobi, the loss of national income to debt and inflation remains a serious problem for developing countries.
But, in our time, the whole world is not watching. Most people do not even know that the IMF and World Bank met in Morocco, and few expect them to solve the world’s problems.
That is because, across the globe, people know that these institutions are, in fact, the authors of pain and are simply not capable of solving the problems that they have created and exacerbated.
The IMF, World Bank, Swift and the neo-colonial Debt Trap system have always been mechanisms to milk poorer countries as ‘Cash Cows’ of the US dominated West
Ahead of the meeting in Morocco, Oxfam issued a statement that strongly criticised the IMF and World Bank for ‘returning to Africa for the first time in decades with the same old failed message: cut your spending, sack public service workers, and pay your debts despite the huge human costs’.
Oxfam highlighted the economic crisis facing the Global South, pointing out that ‘more than half (57 percent) of the world’s poorest countries, home to 2.4 billion people, are having to cut public spending by a combined $229 billion over the next five years’.
Bandage on a Bullet Wound: IMF Social Spending Floors and the Covid-19 Pandemic | HRW
On top of this, they showed that ‘low- and low-middle income countries will be forced to pay nearly half a billion dollars every day in interest and debt repayments between now and 2029’.
Continue reading “How the International Monetary Fund Continues to Shrink the Poorer Nations + Argentina defies IMF blackmail”
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