Can the Imf Now Feed the World?
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the dapper former French finance minister who runs the International Monetary Fund, is finding it hard to conceal a certain swagger in Washington this weekend. If there is one big winner from the wrenching financial crisis of the past year, and the scramble by shell-shocked governments to tackle the turmoil, it is the IMF. At the London summit of G20 countries this month, heads of state signed up to an extraordinary tripling of the IMF’s resources, handing it the responsibility of acting as a giant economic shock absorber, to prevent a string of countries falling victim to crises. As one Oxfam campaigner said at the time: “The IMF is big, it’s bad and it’s back”. “I think you can say that the IMF is playing its role – and that is the rationale for the tripling of resources,” Strauss-Kahn said this weekend. Gordon Brown claimed in London that leaders had banished the “Washington consensus” of neo-liberal economics promulgated by the US-dominated IMF and World Ban
