fatvegan

Some people have accused the IMF of managing a "conspiracy" of banks and wealthy nations, to prevent poor countries from declaring some of their debt as unfair and refusing to pay it back. The poor nations claim that the money was borrowed by dictators who mostly kept it for themselves or used it to kill their own citizens. It seems like a reasonable accusation because the IMF proudly takes the responsibility for creating creditor cartels and its mandate is to preserve financial stability around the whole world, not to help poor countries get less poor.

However, I've found an even more persuasive sign that there's a conspiracy. And it's the piss weak explanations that come out of the IMF attempting to explain why there's no conspiracy. The argument against letting countries not pay back unfair debt is essentially this. If a government is labelled as corrupt because it's stealing the money it borrows, then banks will stop lending money to it. And if banks stop lending money to it the government won't have any money with which to develop the nation.

Seriously. That is all they come up with. It strikes me that if you decide a government is corrupt and stealing development money, then you'd be happy that banks stopped lending to it.

The author sets up a couple of straw proposals so he can fluff out the article explaining what is wrong with them. But the actual model that is proposed by other academics, he only has one argument against. And it's total bollocks. He lays out this one-paragraph argument, and then smugly say there's obviously no need to resort to conspiracy theories - odious debt proposals are apparently going to stay in "cold storage". On the contrary, there seems to a real need for some other explanation. And if a conspiracy theory is the only explanation anyone can find, then why not run with it.

Besides it isn't much of a conspiracy theory. The IMF itself only offers one sensible reason for forcing poor countries to pay back their debt - that the rich countries can't afford for them not to.