End of story…now what?
In “The Fund faces up to the competition” David Rothkopf, October 22, sort of gleefully talks about the IMF having soften their conditions for helping out, without reflecting on the possible fact that they now are just prescribing painkillers instead of remedies, because they, like all, have run out of answers.
The alternatives that Rothkopf seems to favour as he says that “Mr. Chávez distributed four times as much aid in South America” are plain ludicrous since the source of that help is the higher price that has to be paid for oil; and for countries like Honduras and Nicaragua no aid comes even close to being as significant as the remittances sent by their workers, from the US.
The Washington Consensus as interpreted and implemented did not work, at least so we think, end of story; and so now what?
The Basel Consensus on bank regulations has demonstratively really not worked, but there we have unfortunately not yet reached the phase of “end of story, now what?”