International Monetary Fund: Banking Profile
Executive Summary
- The IMF is an international banking cartel that imposes neoliberal policies on countries through banking control.
Introduction
The IMF was formed in order to establish exchange rates, however, they now follow neoliberal policies which seek to get countries into hock, and they enforce austerity on these countries and turn them into colonies of the US and Europe. Countries that follow the neoliberal IMF economists find themselves far worse off. Those countries that ignore the IMF flourish.
Who Funds the IMF?
The IMF is funded by the US Treasury. It pretends to be an “international organization” with “190” member countries, but that is a cover story. The IMF is an extension of both US foreign policy and international banking interests. For example, when Hugo Chavez was deposed in a military coup that was a coordinated effort between the CIA, multinationals, and the political elite in Venezuela, the IMF immediately moved to recognize the new government, even though it was not elected. The IMF seemed to recognize the new political regime incredibly quickly, almost as if they knew it was going to happen before it happened. Almost as if they participate in meetings with the CIA and had an action ready to go which would make the coup appear as if it was legitimate through IMF recognition. Another entity that quickly supported the coup was the New York Times, which also may have been given a tip by US authorities that it was going to happen.
The faux international nature of the IMF is explained in the following quotation.
The International Monetary Fund appears to be a part of the United Nations, much as the Federal Reserve System appears to be a part of the United States government, but it is entirely independent. It is funded on a quota basis by its member nations, almost two hundred in number. The greatest share of capital, however, comes from the more highly industrialized nations such as Great Britain, Japan, France, and Germany. The United States contributes the most, at about twenty per cent of the total. In reality, that twenty per cent represents about twice as much as the number indicates, because most of the other nations contribute worthless currencies which no one wants. The world prefers dollars. One of the routine operations at the IMF is to exchange worthless currencies for dollars so the weaker countries can pay their international bills. This is supposed to cover temporary cash-flow” problems. It is a kind of international FDIC which rushes money to a country that has gone bankrupt so it can avoid devaluing its currency. The transactions are seldom paid back. Although escape from the gold-exchange standard was the long-range goal of the IMF, the only way to convince nations to Participate at the outset was to use gold itself as a backing for its own money supply—at least as a temporary expedient. As Keynes explained it: I felt that the leading central banks would never voluntarily relinquish the then existing forms of the gold standard; and I did not desire a catastrophe sufficiently violent to shake them off involuntarily. The only practical hope lay, therefore, in a gradual evolution in the forms of a managed world currency, taking the existing gold standard as a starting point.
Source: Creature From Jekyll Island
https://www.scribd.com/doc/54912935/The-Creature-from-Jekyll-Island-G-Edward-Griffin
How the IMF Works
Whereas the International Monetary Fund is evolving into a world central bank which eventually will issue a world currency based on nothing, its sister organization, the World Bank, has become its lending agency. Acting as Savior of the World, it seeks to aid the underdeveloped nations, to feed the hungry, and to bring a better life to all mankind. In pursuit of these humanitarian goals, it provides loans to governments at favorable terms, usually at rates below market, for terms as long as fifty years, and often with no payments due until after ten years. Funding for these loans comes from member states in the form of a small amount of cash, plus promises to deliver about ten-times more if the Bank gets into trouble. The promises, described as ” callable capital,” constitute a kind of FDIC insurance program but with no pretense at maintaining a reserve fund. (In that sense it is more honest than the real FDIC which does maintain the pretense but, in reality, is based on nothing more than a similar promise.) Based upon the small amount of seed money plus the far greater amount of “credits” and “promises” from governments of the industrialized countries, the World Bank is able to go into the commercial loan markets and borrow larger sums at extremely low interest rates. After all, the loans are backed by the most powerful governments in the world which have promised to force their taxpayers to make the payments if the Bank should get into trouble. It then takes these funds and relends them to the underdeveloped countries at slightly higher rates, making a profit on the arbitrage. The unseen aspect of this operation is that the money it processes is money which, otherwise, would have been available for investment in the private sector or as loans to consumers. It siphons off much-needed development capital for private industry, prevents new jobs from being created, causes interest rates to rise, and retards the economy at large. Although most of the policy statements of the World Bank deal with economic issues, a close monitoring of its activities reveal a Preoccupation with social and political issues. This should not be surprising considering that the Bank was perceived by its founders as an instrument for social and political change. The change which it was designed to bring about was the building of world socialism, and that is exactly what it is accomplishing today.
Source: Creature From Jekyll Island
The change the IMF proposes is always neoliberalism, which is to financialize economies, privatize their infrastructure, and reduce the impact of participatory government, making private banking interest the primary decision-makers in all countries.
How the IMF Supports Regimes Friendly to the US
Whether and how much countries get from the IMF is highly politically determined by what US foreign policy thinks of a regime. This is expressed in the following quotation.
Nowhere is this pattern more blatant than in Africa. Julius Nyerere, the dictator of Tanzania, is notorious for his “villagization” program in which the army has driven the peasants from their land, burned their huts, and loaded them like cattle into trucks for relocation into government villages. The purpose is to eliminate opposition by bringing everyone into compounds where they can be watched and controlled. Meanwhile the economy staggers, farms have gone to weed, and hunger is commonplace. Yet, Tanzania has received more aid per capita from the World Bank than any other nation. In Uganda, government security forces have engaged in mass detentions, torture, and killing of prisoners. The same is true under the terrorist government in Zimbabwe. Yet, both regimes continue to be the recipients of millions of dollars in World Bank funding. Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) is a classic case. After its independence, the leftist government nationalized (confiscated) many of the farms previously owned by white settlers. The most desirable of these lands became occupied by the government’s senior ruling-party officials, and the rest were turned into state-run collectives. They were such miserable failures that the workers on these farmlands were, themselves, soon begging for food. Not daunted by these failures, the socialist politicians announced in 1991 that they were going to nationalize half of the remaining farms as well. And they barred the courts from inquiring into how much compensation would be paid to their owners. The IMF was represented in Zimbabwe at the time by Michel C a m d e s s u s , the Governor of the central Bank of France, and a former finance minister in Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist government. After being informed of Zimbabwe’s plan to confiscate additional land and to resettle people to work on those lands, C a m d e s s u s agreed to a loan valued at 42 billion rands with full knowledge that much of it would be used for the resettlement project. Perhaps the worst violations of human rights have occurred in Ethiopia under the Marxist regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The famine of 1984-85, which threatened the lives of millions of people, was the result of government nationalization and disruption of agriculture. Massive resettlement programs have torn hundreds of thousands of people from their privately owned land in the north and deported them to concentration-camp “villages” in the south, complete with guard towers. A report by a French voluntary medical-assistance group, Doctors without Borders, reveals that the forced resettlement program may have killed as many people as the famine itself.1 Dr. Rony Brauman, director of the organization, describes their experience: Armed militiamen burst into our compounds, seized our equipment and menaced our volunteers. Some of our employees were beaten, and our trucks, medicines and food stores confiscated. We left Ethiopia branded as enemies of the revolution. The regime spoke the truth. The atrocities committed in the name of Mengistu’s master plan did make us enemies of the revolution. In the 1980s, the world was saddened by photographs of starving children in Ethiopia, but what the West did not realize was that this was a planned famine. It was modelled after Stalin’s J- “Ethiopia Bars Relief Team,” by Blaine Harden, Washington Post, December 3, 1985, p. A-21. ~ “Famine Aid: Were we Duped?” by Dr. Rony Brauman, Raider’s Digest, October ‘1986, p. 7]
Source: Creature From Jekyll Island
While the Fed was setup to be purely a central bank and focused on the money of the US, it has since its inception been involved in international affairs, negatively intervening in the affairs of other countries. This pattern has grown as time has progressed from its origination in 1913/1914. This is expressed in the following quotation.
The IMF/World Bank is the protege of the Federal Reserve. It would not exist without the flow of American dollars and the benevolence of American leadership. The Fed has become an accomplice in the support of totalitarian regimes throughout the world. As stated at the beginning of this study, that is one of the reasons it should be abolished: It is an instrument of totalitarianism. While the top leaders and theoreticians at the IMF and World Bank dream of world socialism, the middle managers and political rulers have more immediate goals in mind. The bureaucracy enjoys a plush life administering the process, and the politicians on the receiving end obtain wealth and power. Ideology is not their concern. Socialism, capitalism, fascism, it makes no difference to them as long as the money flows. Graham Hancock has been an astute observer of the international-aid “industry” and has attended their plush conferences. He knows many of the leading players personally. In his book, Lords of Poverty, he speaks of the IMF’s Structural-Adjustment loans: Corrupt Ministers of Finance and dictatorial Presidents from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are tripping over their own expensive footwear in their unseemly haste to “get adjusted.” For such people, money has probably never been easier to obtain than it is today; with George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism I928; rpt. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1984), p. 470.
This is explained in the following quotation.
Loans from the IMF/World Bank are used primarily to perpetuate themselves and their ruling parties in power—and that is exactly what the IMF/World Bank intends. Rhetoric about helping the poor notwithstanding, the true goal of the transfer of wealth disguised as loans is to get control over the leaders of the less developed countries. After these despots get used to the taste of such an unlimited supply of sweet cash, they will never be able to break the habit. They will be content—already are content—to become little gold-plated cogs in the giant machinery of world government. Ideology means nothing to them: capitalist, communist, socialist, fascist, what does it matter so long as the money keeps coming. The IMF/World Bank literally is buying these countries and using our money to do it. The recent inclusion of Red China and the former Soviet bloc on the list of IMF/World Bank recipient countries signals the final phase of the game. Now that Latin America and Africa have been “purchased” into the New World Order, this is the final frontier. In a relatively short time span, China, Russia, and the Eastern European countries have now become the biggest borrowers and/ already, they are in arrears on their payments. This is where the action will lie in the months ahead.
Source: Creature From Jekyll Island