The IMF and the Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

I will analyze here the incoherence in the response of international institutions to the current crisis, and focus on the window of opportunity that this has opened for progressive thinking and policy-making. Things have been bleak for the Left in the past decades, and in this context it is quite understandable for all of us to not recognize change when it presents itself or at least when it becomes possible. This is true for all of us who have railed for so long at the extension of neoliberalism across the developing world at the hands of the IMF, the World Bank, the economics profession, the United States government, and neoliberal reformers in the developing world. All of these agents have collectively been a very powerful juggernaut. It is against that background that those wishing for change failed to recognize, let alone take hope in, any signs announcing it, and I think we could forgive ourselves if the stakes were not so high. But the matter of whether change is underway is so crucial that we can’t afford to be complacent at the present juncture.