Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

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One has to be somewhat ignorant of the mission of the IMF or World Bank to think this is somehow new:

"Poroshenko was telling Joe Biden that in order to get an American aid package, he’d gone beyond even what the I.M.F. asked for and raised energy prices for ordinary Ukrainians not by 75%, but by 100%, as well as taking steps to curtail subsidized medicine prices."

Where this is good or bad, this has been common since the 1970s. Some writers refer to this process as "neoliberalism" as the effort seemed motivated by a desire to bring back the old era of laissez faire. Since the 1970s the IMF has demanded similar internal "reforms" in nations in South America, Africa, and Asia. If this is surprising to anyone then I would assume they are young or they have not been paying attention.

Everyone should read Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. I first read it in highschool and it really shaped my thinking about the USAs role in international affairs. Some accuse the author of exaggerating certain things but nobody really denies the main facts that he lays out.

> Some writers refer to this process as "neoliberalism" as the effort seemed motivated by a desire to bring back the old era of laissez faire.

Some writers refer to this as helping a country use the IMF as a political crap shield to enact necessary policies that would be otherwise politically nightmares to pull but are absolutely necessary to implement in order to get the state's finances under control.

I lived in a country that was subjected to an IMF intervention after their government bankrupted the state, and the IMF's role on the recovery was done mainly by eliminating heavy subsidies and cash transfers from the state to a few public-in-name-but-private-in-operation companies which were chronically underfinanced and politically unable to change their pricing models to allow them to cover their operational cost. So yeah, the IMF name was used to justify price hikes, but let's not fool ourselves into believing that those reforms didn't had a positive impact on the state's expenditure.

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