BRICS creating parallel Monetary Fund disillusioned with IMF and World Bank - expert
© Collage: Voice of Russia
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are fed up with the US failure to ratify a four-year-old agreement aimed at reforming the IMF system. Thus the post war consensus on financing bodies appears to be breaking down, writes the expert in his RT Op-Ed ‘BRICS building parallel IMF.’
"The US and Europe have maintained a stranglehold on the IMF/World Bank C-suite not only in the face of a massive eastern renaissance but also with a certain degree of abject hypocrisy given the abysmal financial management of spendthrift US governments for decades let alone the travesty of recent European economic governance," he notes.
According to Patrick Young the IMF is gradually losing its significance as an international financial arbiter. First Dominique Strauss-Kahn and then Christine Lagarde have been entrapped by the "flawed policies of big debt and big government," utterly ruinous for the European economy.
"During recent European bailout negotiations, IMF minutes suggest the political classes managed to ride roughshod over the IMF in order to maintain the flawed (and still crumbling) euro currency at all costs. In that sense, having a weak European with ambitions for higher political office makes a mockery of the idea that the International Monetary Fund is anything more than an overdraft facility to be rigged in favor of perceived western political interests," Patrick L Young explains, adding, "No wonder the rising East is disillusioned."
It should be noted that the BRICS bloc of emerging economies is expecting all preparatory work for setting up its Development Bank to be done by July, 2014, according to Reuters. Political neutrality of the BRICS-Monetary Fund appears to become its unquestionable "competitive advantage." It will help the new structure to operate without fear or favor, deems the expert.
"What the IMF really needs," he stresses, "are strong technocrats as opposed to the spineless politicians who generally operate with (at the very least!) one eye on their next political position."
