After April’s G-20 summit in London, Western leaders were praising the decision to increase the International Monetary Fund’s coffers to one trillion dollars. Before the crisis hit, the IMF had been reduced to virtual irrelevance as countries the world over scrambled to free themselves of the IMF’s strict loan conditions. The IMF claims that it has changed its ways, but the evidence so far is the continuation of a dangerous double standard between the West and the rest.
Raúl Moreno is a Salvadoran economist and long-time critic of neo-liberal economic policies. He currently serves as the research and monitoring coordinator at FESPAD (Foundation for Study and Application of the Law) and is a professor of economics at the University of El Salvador in San Salvador.
Mark Weisbrot is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: the Phony Crisis and has written extensively about the political economy of Latin America. He is also the founding president of Just Foreign Policy, an NGO dedicated to reforming US foreign policy.
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Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of “Failed: What the ‘Experts’ Got Wrong About the Global Economy” (2015, Oxford University Press).
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