October 22, 2008

End of story…now what?

Sir how sad that the Washington Consensus is just a mythical phrase coined by John Williamson and not a document or a statue because, if it was, we could at least burn or topple it just to get over it, once and for all, and save us so much unnecessary obsessed rambling about how malicious it was, even though most of us agree that whether the recipes in that consensus worked or not had mostly to do with what ingredients were used, who cooked and how the cooking was done.

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?”