Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Sleeping Beauty
I quote Pat Buchanan:

What is the purpose of keeping the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and its agencies, and NATO, all of which date to an era long gone?

The World Bank and IMF were created when the United States was the greatest creditor on earth. The bank was to lend for the reconstruction and development of Europe and Asia. The IMF was to provide loans to help members with balance of payments problems.

When Europe and Asia recovered, the need for the World Bank came to an end. By 1971, when the United States closed the gold window and let the dollar float, the need for an IMF to maintain fixed rates of exchange, in a world of floating rates, disappeared.

Yet both institutions reinvented themselves as lenders of last resort to bankrupt Third World regimes, and Republican presidents and a Republican Congress went along. Why? Why should the United States, now the world's largest debtor nation, go out into the capital markets and borrow billions, so the World Bank and IMF can continue to subsidize the most corrupt and least competent regimes on earth? Does this make sense?

Between them, the Japanese and Chinese have amassed $2 trillion -- two thousand billion dollars -- in reserves. Why not turn the IMF and World Bank playpens over to them? Though the soft-loan window of the World Bank, the Institutional Development Fund, was created to help "the poorest of the poor," 8,000 of the 10,000 World Bank employees live and work in the Washington area, where "World Bank neighborhood" is a realtor's way of saying, "You can't afford it."

7 posted on 05/16/2007 1:32:43 PM PDT by Jake The Goose
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]


To: Jake The Goose
I quote Pat Buchanan:

Well, in this case, I totally agree with Pat. He's a Libertarian -- so he knows a thing or two about economic reality.

24 posted on 05/16/2007 2:49:21 PM PDT by Sleeping Beauty
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson