[stop-imf] FW: ECONOMY: Parting Shots from an Impending Non-Entity (fwd)

[Robert Weissman]

If you weren't up for reading Camdessus's parting remarks, you may prefer
this amusing and informative account from Abid Aslam:

Copyright 2000, Inter Press Service
ECONOMY: Parting Shots from an Impending Non-Entity   

By Abid Aslam
WASHINGTON, Feb 9 (IPS) - Michel Camdessus, outgoing chief of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), says he looks forward to obscurity - but
not before firing some parting shots at critics. 

 "I will be a non-entity. You will hear no more about me," Camdessus says,
reflecting on his resignation Feb. 15, after 13 years as IMF managing
director. Meanwhile, "I can really speak my mind." 

 So what's on the mind of the man who, for many, has come to embody an
international campaign to reshape the Third World and former Soviet bloc in
the image of a free-market West - and whose agency's name has become
synonymous with austerity? 

 Three things: Vested interests, which he sees behind mass uprisings
against the IMF's bitter medicine in East Asia; politicians who, as
representatives of the Fund's 182 shareholder nations, have shirked
responsibility for their own decisions; and the coalition of grassroots
groups who, year after year, have assembled outside IMF headquarters here
to call for the institution's abolition. 

 "There are still people around the world who can, without provoking an
outcry, say that the IMF kills babies," Camdessus laments. In his view,
these protestors represent "the old demagoguery of the world pretending
that we don't serve the common good." 

 The IMF chief is equally dismissive of Asians who - as the financial
crises of 1997-98 unfolded and pushed millions of workers out of their jobs
- protested austerity measures and long-term restructuring required in
exchange for international bail-outs assembled and supervised by the Fund. 

 "You have vested interests in the world trying to destroy us because, of
course, they know that we destroy them. You cannot go and confront the
family monopolies in Indonesia, or the chaebols (conglomerates) in Korea,
and so on, without, well, provoking some adverse, negative campaigns," he
says. 

 Making matters worse for Camdessus, the agency has been left to take the
heat for its most unpopular actions. 

 Yet, he asserts, "we are accountable to 182 countries of the world and
they take, every day...all the decisions of this institution. But it
happens that, well, because it's difficult and because politicians are
politicians, they don't always take responsibility for what is being done
here." 

 Camdessus, who opted late last year to cut short a term that would have
ended in 2002, leaves his successor to deal with the fall-out of
investigations into the misuse of international funds by Russian
authorities and commercial oligarchs. 

 The next IMF chief also will have to settle running debates between
members and staffers who support the Fund's current drift toward
development-oriented goals and those who want the agency to return to its
original, more narrowly monetary, mandate. 

 First Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer will take over as acting
chief until the international community can agree on a successor. The
appointment process has been fraught with political tension and has been
assailed by Third World countries, international aid agencies and
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) alike as too secretive and
undemocratic. 

 "It is disgraceful that the millions of people living daily under IMF
influence have absolutely no opportunity to engage in the process of
choosing the managing director," says an open letter from dozens of groups
worldwide. 

 Borrowing countries need a greater say in the appointment, the NGOs
reason, because these countries have little say in the Fund's executive
board, which presides over day-to-day operational decisions. 

 Traditionally, the IMF is headed by a European while its Bretton Woods
sibling, the World Bank, is led by a U.S. citizen. German Chancellor
Gerhard Schroder is lobbying heavily for Caio Koch-Weser, a deputy finance
minister. The German leader reportedly telephoned U.S. President Bill
Clinton late last month to say he felt that winning the IMF post was vital
for relations between their countries. 

 Camdessus joined the IMF in January 1987, having headed the French
Treasury and Bank of France and having presided over meetings of the Paris
Club of bilateral creditors. 

 His performance in steering debt reschedulings led some developing
countries to support his appointment, but he has since drawn fire for the
determination with which he has insisted that poor countries liberalise
their markets and financial systems. 

 This approach has been seen as being in lockstep with the U.S. Treasury
and, overseas, the Fund increasingly has been considered as a favoured tool
of U.S. policy. 

 Yet, the agency and its leader also have grown unpopular here among
lawmakers, who have missed no opportunity to snipe at the IMF whenever the
U.S. administration has asked them to approve more money for it. 

 Eventually, they have capitulated on almost every occasion. 

 Right-wingers have denounced Camdessus as a socialist while left-wingers
have excoriated him as a capitalist. Nationalists here argue the Fund
wastes U.S. money and fails to promote U.S. values abroad - even as
internationalists decry the heavy hand with which the agency restructures
the rest of the world in the U.S. image. 

 Free-marketeers want the IMF to stop bailing out private investors and let
them feel the pain of unwise moves rather than encourage moral hazards and
repeated mistakes. Populists agree, arguing that public funds have been
used to rescue private gamblers. 

 Abolitionists demand that the agency be scrubbed. Reformers see-saw,
alternately wanting the Fund to abandon long-term economic policy-making -
especially through structural adjustment programmes - and asking it to be
guided by the tenets of poverty reduction and sustainable development when
establishing programmes in borrowing countries. 

 Everyone seems to agree the agency has been too secretive. 

 "We have made this institution distinctly more transparent," Camdessus
insists. "We have tried to give as much as allowed by our membership to
make this institution totally transparent." 

 Camdessus's departure long has been rumoured amid growing criticism of the
Fund's handling of financial crises which began in Thailand in mid-1997.
The IMF assembled international emergency loans of more than 100 billion
dollars to stop the trouble, only to watch 40 percent of the global economy
get pushed into recession. 

 The Fund is upgrading its current projections of global economic growth,
however, and the prospect of sustained recovery reminds Camdessus of a view
long expressed by his deputy and interim successor, Fischer. 

 As Camdessus puts it: "When you have a crisis, and when difficult measures
are announced, these are (seen as) the IMF's policies. But when success
starts emerging...and the skies are better and more sunny, then the
policies are the policies of the country and you don't hear any more about
the IMF." 

 No hard feelings, though. "It's what we call our ultimate objective, which
is ownership. The countries then own their policies and their success, and
we are happy to see that, and people forget about us," he says.
(END/IPS/12/EF/aa/ks/00)