The International Monetary Fund is apparently concerned about its image. “I really don’t like it when we’re portrayed as this draconian, rigorous, terrible IMF,” Managing Director Christine Lagarde said on Thursday in an online news conference. “We don’t want draconian measures to apply to Greece, which has already made a lot of sacrifices,” she added at the same time when thousands of Greece were on the streets protesting the Greek proposal for pensions reform with social security contributions hikes and cuts in future pensions. Not that the IMF’s proposal is much better.
The IMF reportedly demands the planned national Pension to be below 384 euro (so the Greek proposal), minimum years of work for reduced pension to rise from 15 to 20 and additional cuts 6%-30% to all current pensions.
After her short statement on the image of the IMF, Lagarde dropped a small bombshell, one of the many that confirm the Dragon-image of the IMF. She said that “a possible debt relief is directly linked to the overhaul of the Greek Pensions system” that “needs to be sustainable on short and long term.”
She added that the Greek Pensions system is “not viable” as it need state injections of 10% of the GDP on annual basis.”
Lagarde added that “Greece has to be a success in real life, not on papers,” and she was apparently pleased that someone in the IMF had displaced the papers with the error calculations and wrong projections.
“We are not a Dragon. Ok, just a little bit.”
No, Lagarde did not revealed either one of the most sinful IMF-secrets: why the Fund kept on approving Review after Review the Greek “progress” for the 1. and the 2. MoU, when it was clear that the Papandreou and the Samaras governments did not proceed with the structural reforms as they were allegedly obliged to. Maybe because structural reforms were never on the IMF’s priorities list but just drastic cuts and dramatic austerity for the purpose of achieving internal devaluation.
PS Welcome to the unreal world of the IMF.
May be IMF needs money to budget the new usa colony, ucraina.
May be the IMF members, Christine LaGarde and others who decide the future of Greece, and meet to death while collecting their salaries, be invited to live for a week with a family in Greece whose income of 400 Euros a month without health insurance is considered enough by the Triumvirate.
A week won’t make it as these folks are talented and will pose as a stranded and ripped off tourist who even got no passport and doesn’t know what embassy to ask for help
Davos 2016 – The Global Economic Outlook.
Did you watch it.
Lagarde was asked to give a forcast for 2016.
When Lagarde was initially appointed to the IMF, for about 6 months she was talking moderately intelligently about economic problems. Apparently, this was because she was talking with the senior economists of the IMF in order to learn something about the subject. After about 6 months, she suddenly started spouting malakies at every opportunity. Guess what had happened. She stopped taking advice from economists and was talking only with politicians.
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The moral here is clear: do not allow politicians to be in charge of anything, anywhere: they will always fuck it up. In fact, that was the original idea behind independent central banks — but the French and Germans managed to fuck that up with the eurozone anyway.