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The IMF’s official job sounds simple and attractive. It is supposedly there to ensure poor countries don’t fall into debt, and if they do, to lift them out with loans and economic expertise. It is presented as the poor world’s best friend and guardian. But beyond the rhetoric, the IMF was designed to be dominated by a handful of rich countries – and, more specifically, by their bankers and financial speculators. The IMF works in their interests, every step of the way.
"IT’S A SAD, GREY morning in Youghal. As you walk along the town’s main street you pass Merricks department store, once the oldest in Ireland, which is lying empty after the last retailer moved out of the store’s former building a few months ago. Farther along is the Regal Cinema, which shut last year after 74 years in operation. The Devonshire Arms, one of two large hotels in the town, is hard to miss: it’s had its windows boarded up for months. The town has dozens more empty shopfronts, with dusty windows and peeling paintwork or “to let” signs, which used to host bustling toyshops, newsagents, supermarkets and pubs."
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The big lie you have been told is that if we preside over a default on Irish bank debt the financial markets will punish us by taking money out of the country.
This is wrong. The opposite will happen. Money will flow into the country as the markets will conclude that the Irish bank crisis is over and it’s time to invest in a country with huge growth potential.
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Last night, over a jar, the bankers told me that the flows of cash from Germany have been huge because the average well-to-do German is taking his savings out of the euro and putting them on deposit here in Switzerland. The fact that the Swiss banks normally offer no interest on deposits and still get huge inflows is indicative of the fragility at the heart of the euro.
They also explained that lots of money is coming from Ireland. These guys, who I worked with years ago, have never really seen any business from Ireland and certainly during the boom they looked on with a sense of trepidation because they had seen this before.
Now they are getting calls from Dublin on a daily basis.
They have concluded that this is because the banks and the Government can’t be trusted. These investment bankers — serious financial people — agree that the Irish taxpayer has no business bailing out the banks. At the table last night were two bondholders, men who invested in the Irish banks in the good times. They are now embarrassed because they were taken in by the Irish and European spin.
No one could have predicted that letting a semi-retarded dry drunk with a history of abject business failure run the country for 8 years might end up having negative economic consequences.
The sub-prime situation explained
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A couple more of weeks of this and Alasdair Darling will announce that everybody now has a land grant on the Moon, and there'll be maybe five hours of lunatic speculation before shares dip again. The week after that, Henry Paulson will announce that from
A respite from the gibbering neocons of the OpenRepublic (fascists!)
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