The Self-Enrichment of the Elites: Economic Hegemony and the Federal Reserve

In his book Globalization and Its Discontents former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz details the ignominious history of IMF ‘structural adjustment’ programs inflicted around the globe in the 1990s. While the IMF has admitted that economic austerity is both theoretically flawed and socially destructive it remains a core IMF policy and is currently being forced on peripheral Europe. This institutional persistence is characterized by the Western economic mainstream as an accident of history, as flawed theories driving bad policy decisions. Another explanation that also fits the facts is that the IMF is a tool of Western economic power used to extract wealth from poor countries under the contrived apologetics of the ‘market’ economics it claims as its goal.

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