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Article: IMF: Case of a Dead Theory Walking.
- Article from:
- Foreign Policy in Focus
- Article date:
- April 17, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Institute for Policy Studies. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Asian financial crisis has eased, but its reverberations have enmeshed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a major legitimacy crisis over its recently assumed mission and its ability to implement it. That new mission--promoting free capital mobility around the globe--parallels U.S. policy, though deviating sharply from the IMF's original function. The IMF's crisis is thus also a U.S. policy crisis.
Under the Bretton Woods Agreement, reached by the major capitalist powers toward the end of WW II, the World Bank was to provide reconstruction financing, while the IMF was to provide short-term financing to stabilize exchange rates. The basic objective of the ...