How do IMF bailouts work?
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The IMF is to the current world order what the British East India Company was to the British Empire.
It works like this. A country, likely one which has spent decades or even centuries having its resources and people stripped down to bedrock by various empires, finds itself in a financial hole it cannot hope to dig its way out of. They have no infrastructure, their people are poor, and all their natural resources are owned by companies which take the profits overseas, leaving them with the ecological ramifications of their extraction. This country would like to improve their lot, of course, and so they start looking for investors.
Unfortunately, they are a poor investment. They have no infrastructure, little in the way of education, and all the valuable things in the country are already owned by foreign interests. So there are no takers, and the country will remain poor. Enter, the IMF. They are perfectly willing to offer loans to such countries. They aren’t a bank in the usual sense, after all, intended to make a profit for itself on its own. They are an international consortium, funded by the very countries which own all the natural resources, meant to “solve” this very problem. For a fascinating definition of solve. The IMF is perfectly willing to loan such countries the money they need to start building infrastructure and educating their people. But there are…stipulations. As one might expect of a deal with the Devil.
One common stipulation is that if the nation defaults on the loan, all the infrastructure gets sold to the highest bidder. Of course, the highest bidder is usually a Western corporation from one of the countries funding the IMF, so this means said countries now own even more of their former colonies. Most IMF loans come with economic regulations and trade “deals” which allow Western companies to set up sweatshops, increasing the poverty of their people and resulting in the early deaths of many due to effective enslavement. They also ban these countries from attempting to nationalize their natural resources, and impose crippling sanctions if they do it anyway. That’s one of the things which happened to Venezuela. All told, the IMF offers a pittance of capital now in return for increasing Western dominance of the lives and economies of every nation which takes the deal. There’s not much material difference between what it does and what the British East India Company did. It’s just been painted over and made more palatable-seeming on the surface.
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