Quotes About The Imf

“I became convinced that the advanced industrial countries, through international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank, were not only not doing all that they could to help these [developing] countries but were sometimes making their life more difficult. IMF programs had clearly worsened the East Asian crisis, and the "shock therapy" they had pushed in the former Soviet Union and its satellites played an important role in the failure of the transition.”

— Joseph E. Stiglitz

“Colonel Sanders as played by Hot Daddy Harrison Ford, cracking the whip on some island plantation, topping every native boy, stopping only long enough to enjoy a refreshing Coca Cola. Because every white guy is a blonde, Aryan top. All of us are the Christian Soldiers of Capitalism that flew TWA into your country, depositing AIDs in your brothels and IMF loans in your banks.”

— Tom Cardamone

“While the IMF certainly failed the people of Asia, it did not fail Wall Street - far from it. The hot money may have been spooked by the IMF's drastic measures, but the large investment houses and multinational firms were emboldened ... These fun-seeking firms understood that as a result of the IMF's "adjustments," pretty much everything in Asia was now up for sale - and the more the market panicked, the more desperate Asian companies would be to sell, pushing their prices through the floor.”

— Naomi Klein

“Argentina & Iraq have been decimated by the same process with different weapons; an IMF cheque & cruise missiles.”

— Arundhati Roy

“Once you understand the process of corporate globalization, you have to see that what happened in Argentina, the devastation of Argentina by the IMF, is part of the same machine that is destroying Iraq. Both are efforts to break open and to control markets. And so Argentina is destroyed by the chequebook, and Iraq is destroyed by the cruise missile. If the chequebook won't work, the cruise missile will. Hell hath no fury like a market scorned.”

— Arundhati Roy

“The management of the New York fiscal crisis pioneered the way for neoliberal practices both domestically under Reagan and internationally through the IMF (international monetary fund) in the 1980s. It established the principle that in the event of a conflict between the integrity of financial institutions , on one hand , and the well-being of the citizens on the other, the former was to be privileged .it emphasized that the role of the government was to create a good business climate rather than look to the needs and well-being of the popualtion at large.”

— David Harvey

“The International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world's debt enforcers-"You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs." I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the '70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn't figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called "go-go banking"); how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early '80s; how, during the '80s and '90s, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on”

— David Graeber

“IMF is really designed to protect creditors not debtors.”

— David Graeber

“The Muslim leaders swallow the advice of the Western powers and bodies like the IMF and World Bank, even when it is bad for their countries and they know this.”

— Abu Bakar Bashir

“But such IMF pressure is very much helpful for me to push such a, you know, reform. So in this sense I think IMF is very much helpful for alien society.”

— Kim Dae-jung

“The UK has a poor investment record. According to IMF data, we have come seventh out of the top seven industrialised countries since 1999.”

— Frances O'Grady

“China is beginning to act more like a world citizen. We need China to be more active on the world stage. For example, we should want China to be a bigger participant and a bigger shareholder in the IMF. We should want it to be an even more active participant in the G8 and G20.”

— Roger Altman

“Korea's early repayment of the full amount of loans from the IMF is a major milestone.”

— Horst Koehler

“Conservatives believe that international institutions such as the United Nations are anti-American and anti-Israeli cabals. Progressives do not like the economic medicine that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank force down the throats of developing countries.”

— Michael Ignatieff

“Marcia Wilson was a good example of Omega's core strategy for creating a New World Order. It involved placing their people, or moles, in positions of power within the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the White House and global organizations like the UN, the IMF and the World Bank. This enabled Omega to pull some of the strings of these organizations and to direct American, and world politics, to an extent.”

— James Morcan

“Americans are gathering the courage to just say no. We are saying no to addictive consumer lifestyles. We are saying no to wars and corporate takeover and the IMF loans that gobble up people and their resources.”

— Cynthia McKinney

“The IMF is set up to deal with liquidity crises.”

— Steve Hanke

“But what will happen, and I got this from reliable sources, is that the International Monetary Fund will skedaddle from D.C., possibly to Singapore or Beijing, and then they're going to make an IMF recovery plan for America, divide the country into concessions, and hand them over to the sovereign wealth funds. Norway, China, Saudi Arabia, all that jazz.”

— Gary Shteyngart

“The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.”

— Jose Saramago

“The runs started in Thailand after the IMF intervened in such a dramatic way. Then the IMF came to Indonesia.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

“I think the IMF helped to detonate the Indonesian crisis.”

— Jeffrey Sachs

“The good thing about the IMF is there is no European politics involved.”

— Mark Rutte

“I have full confidence in the IMF. It is a very strong international institution.”

— Jose Manuel Barroso

“By the way, the European Union Member States together - even the euro area Member States together - are by far the biggest contributors to the IMF.”

— Jose Manuel Barroso

“We do have some assistance from the World Bank but not from the IMF. We are not borrowing yet, but we are considering, in the future, borrowing from the Kuwait Fund to support our infrastructure development.”

— Jose Ramos-Horta

“There were times when there were riots in Africa, demonstrations against the IMF because of the policy advice they were giving, the conditionalities they were imposing, and the difficulties that arose out of the implementation of those conditionalities.”

— Jakaya Kikwete

“Japan is the largest creditor country in the world, so we have made contributions to the stability of international markets and we want this IMF meeting to confirm that we will continue to contribute.”

— Yoshihiko Noda

“The more there is a European solution to a theoretical, but possible, problem in the markets, the less we will have to talk about an I.M.F. solution.”

— George Papandreou

“Sadly, I do my homework. I've a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I'll read C. Fred Bergsten's defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It's embarrassing to admit.”

— Bono

“International institutions like the Security Council, the General Assembly, the G20, the BRICs, the IMF, etc., continue to be little more than an extension of the (increasingly conflicting) values and interests of member states.”

— Ian Bremmer

“It is often believed that, as long as we're the economic powerhouse of the world and have a huge military advantage, we can control the world by "owning" international organizations like the United Nations, NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank. These international organizations may also be used as a means to get around congressional oversight and restrictions that Congress and the people might prefer. To a degree, that control has been achieved. But now that the US is the largest debtor nation in the world and in all history, the days of military and economic supremacy are numbered, as are the days of dollar hegemony.”

— Ron Paul

“Something new is blowing. On a downtown Kingston wall: IMF-Is Manley Fault. General election called for October 30, 1980. Somebody is driving you through Bavaria, near the Austrian border. A hospital sprouting out of the forest like magic. Hills in the background tipped with snow like cake icing. You meet the tall and frosty Bavarian, the man who helps the hopeless. He smiles but his eyes are set too far back and they vanish in the shadow of his brow. Cancer is a red alert that the whole body is in danger, he says. Thank God the food he forbids, Rastafari had forbidden long time. A sunrise is a promise. Something new is blowing. November 1980. A new party wins the general election and the man who killed me steps up to the podium with his brothers to take over the country. He has been waiting for so long he leaps up the stairs and trips.”

— Marlon James

“The United States has given frequent and enthusiastic support to the overthrow of democracy in favor of "investor friendly" regimes. The World Bank, IMF, and private banks have consistently lavished huge sums on terror regimes, following their displacement of democratic governments, and a number of quantitative studies have shown a systematic positive relationship between U.S. and IMF / World Bank aid to countries and their violations of human rights.”

— Edward S. Herman

“The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF] ... when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress.”

— Robert Reich

“We simply cannot afford any further delay in providing the IMF with the resources it requires to help contain the threat of further financial and political instability around the world.”

— Robert Rubin

“I found myself doing extraordinary things that arent in the textbooks. Then the IMF asked the U.S. to please print money. The whole world is now practicing what they have been saying I should not. I decided that God had been on my side and had come to vindicate me.”

— Gideon Gono

“The IMF economists were doubtless shaken by the extreme failures of their prescriptions over many years, and by the collapse of the intellectual edifice of economic theory on which they were relying.”

— Noam Chomsky

“What can Americans learn from the Olympics spectacle? According to the IMF, China will succeed America as the dominant economic power in the course of the next presidential term, so Howard Fineman, editorial director of the Huffington Post and MSNBC mainstay, was anxious to pick up tips. 'Brits long ago lost their empire,' he tweeted, 'but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully.' So there's that.”

— Mark Steyn

“If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power.”

— Mark Steyn

“I do wish that the IMF and the World Bank would disappear soon.”

— Hugo Chavez

“One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of bifurcations is thus symbolized by 1989.”

— Immanuel Wallerstein

“We must work to repeal trade agreements that impede access to affordable generic drugs. We must work to cause the IMF and the World Bank to reduce and eventually eliminate the debt that takes poor nations' resources away from crises like AIDS. We must focus America's leadership on addressing and ending this epidemic.”

— Dennis Kucinich

“The United States is pushing as policy division of the world into rival currency camps - the dollar area on the one hand, and the Russia-Chinese-Shanghai Cooperation Organization group on the other, especially now that the IMF has changed its rules. People think that if there are rival currency groupings and national currencies are going bust, we might as well use gold as a safe haven.”

— Michael Hudson

“Look at Ukraine. Its currency, the hernia, is plunging. The euro is really in a problem. Greece is problematic as to whether it can pay the IMF, which is threatening not to be part of the troika with the European Central Bank and the European Union making more loans to enable Greece to pay the bondholders and the banks. Britain is having a referendum as to whether to withdraw from the European Union, and it looks more and more like it may do so. So the world's politics are in turmoil.”

— Michael Hudson

“In Egypt the neoliberal programs have meant statistical growth, like right before the Arab Spring, Egypt was a kind of poster child for the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund:] the marvelous economic management and great reform. The only problem was for most of the population it was a kind of like a blow in the solar plexus: wages going down, benefits being eliminated, subsidized food gone and meanwhile, high concentration of wealth and a huge amount of corruption.”

— Noam Chomsky

“With all that IMF money, the Thailand's and Mexico's are spared the consequences of their fiscal incompetence, and Wall Street's heavy hitters are spared the consequences of their stupid investments. The global economy is a rigged game, rigged so Third World politicians, rich investors and global corporations win - and U.S. taxpayers lose.”

— Pat Buchanan

“The IMF is the International Mafia Federation. They're the loansharks of last resort.”

— Gerald Celente

“The interests of the IMF represent the big international interests that today seem to be established and concentrated in Wall Street.”

— Che Guevara

“If it is an element of liberation for Latin America, I believe that it should have demonstrated that. Until now, I have not been aware of any such demonstration. The IMF performs an entirely different function: precisely that of ensuring that capital based outside of Latin America controls all of Latin America.”

— Che Guevara