Posted on 07/20/2012 7:50:41 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
The International Monetary Fund deliberately suppressed evidence that Europe was heading for a debt crisis, according to a blistering resignation letter from a senior economist at the fund.
Peter Doyle, an economist in the IMF’s European department, also used the letter to attack the appointment of Christine Lagarde, the fund’s managing director. The allegations are particularly embarrassing coming from someone who until last month was a senior official at the Washington-based institution and at a time when Europe’s debt crisis shows little sign of easing.
“The substantive difficulties in these crises, as with others, were identified well in advance but suppressed here (at the IMF),” Mr Doyle wrote in the letter to Shakour Shaalan, head of the IMF’s board of directors. The letter goes on to claim that “the failure of the fund to issue them (warnings) is a failing of the first order, even if such warnings may not have been heeded”.
The IMF, which has played a central role in the bail-outs of Greece, Portugal and Ireland, has recently tapped countries from the UK to China for another $500bn (£320bn) to be deployed in Europe, should the debt crisis escalate. Mr Doyle, whose 20-year career at the fund included spells in Sweden, Denmark and Israel, said its failure to give a warning has led to “suffering” in Greece and elsewhere and left it “playing catch-up and reactive roles in last-ditch efforts to save it (the euro)”.
Last year’s election of Ms Lagarde, the former French finance minister, is also criticised by Mr Doyle as illegitimate. The selection process for the top job at the IMF has come under increasing criticism for failing to reflect the changing economic balance of power in the world. Since the IMF’s founding in 1944, a European has always had
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
WHAT?!? Europe is having some sort of debt problem?? Who knew??? How did they ever keep this such a secret??
Looks like they were doing a bang-up job. (pun absolutely, positively intentional.)
The really sad fact is that all these financial gurus at IMF, EU central banks, Federal Reserve and the US Treasury have to date failed to understand the true significance of the “debt” crisis. The problem is that for three generations Western countries have been consuming more than they produce. They are maintaining a lifestyle for their citizens with government programs, entitlements and guarantees by squandering capital on consumption. This should have been apparent to these empowered gurus. Instead of putting an albeit painful stop to the nonsense, they have merely served their political masters by constructing more financial gimmicks to keep the degenerate consumption party going. More capital is being squandered to maintain unsustainable consumption. When the big crash comes economic historians will have no trouble identifying the culprits.
Golly gee willikers, who knew?
Everything the UN touches turns to nauseating sulfur compounds, stricken through with corruption. “Embedded liberalism” via the IMF is the postwar disease that led to this, with all its promotion of social welfare. This resulted in the rise of fanatical politicians in the EU who wanted a financial “beneficial crisis” so they could overthrow freedom in the continent . . .
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