The successes of the IMF

Jeffrey Franks, the head of the IMF mission in Romania, yesterday said that the crisis impacted Romania mores severely than he had expected.

Meaning, the IMF made a mistake.

It wouldn"t be the first time the IMF was wrong about a country.

In fact, the IMF was wrong about the whole world, not just a country.

Last year, the IMF apologized for not warning the world about the financial crisis.

While apologizing, they mentioned that the experts of the IMF had in fact predicted the crisis years in advance, but that the management team had decided not to tell the world about it.

We"re sorry!

That"s it.

The IMF is one strange institution.

We know it has a general manager.

We don"t know who is its president.

Isn"t that a natural question?

Who is the president of the IMF?

Because we don"t know who its president is, we are all forced to call Dominique Strauss-Kahn the "head" of the IMF, an approximate translation of CEO ("chief executive officer") - which is his true position.

If the IMF is wrong, then perhaps we could take it up with its president. Except it doesn"t have one.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn can only apologize.

Nothing more.

He is not responsible.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn apologized concerning his extramarital affair with his employee Piroska Nagy.

The consequences of the IMF not warning the world about the crisis were a little bit more severe: The board of Directors of the IMF accused him of making "a serious error in judgment ".

The IMF has 186 shareholders.

Its shareholders are countries.

Among them, Romania.

Countries and their people don"t have the simple possibility of grabbing the IMF by the collar for its mistakes.

But are they mistakes?

In truth, when the loans are reimbursed the IMF does not pay any dividends to its shareholders, except by crediting their accounts which are opened ... with the IMF itself.

And like this, the IMF gets the money it will then lend to the next troubled country.

If crises didn"t happen any more, that would be the worst thing that couldn"t happen to the IMF.

In theory, they could very easily be programmed, by mathematic modeling.

If we look at the results of the interventions of the IMF, we will see only failures, with just two or three exceptions.

Of course, it depends from where you look: for the countries that borrowed from the IMF, led either to social unrest, either to worsening economic performance, or to both -thus, obviously failures; but, from the IMF"s point of view, those are probably true successes.

If they weren"t, we wouldn"t need the IMF.