First Lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s recent decisive victory in Argentina’s presidential
elections, the first for a woman in that country, has meant inevitable comparisons. Frequently referred
to as "Argentina’s Hillary," the president-elect is the glamorous wife of current President
Nestor Kirchner, and despite a long personal political resume she is sometimes likened to Evita Peron.
Then there’s the widespread noting of how Argentina has followed in Chile’s footsteps in electing
a woman president. But Fernandez de Kirchner ‘s win probably matters more because of where she stands
on the political spectrum than because of her gender. As she takes office on December 10, the next
president of Argentina will deepen the consolidation of Latin America’s increasingly decisive "left
turn."
IMF
All Fall Down
Ten years after the Asian financial cataclysm of 1997, the economies of the Western Pacific Rim are growing, though not at the rates they enjoyed before the crisis. The region has been indelibly scarred by the crisis. There is greater poverty, inequality, and social destabilization than before the crisis. South Korea’s painful labor market reforms, for instance, have produced the quiet desperation behind one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries.
Change and No Change at IMF
In contrast to the circus atmosphere that surrounded the World Bank presidency, a surprise handover of the reins at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) should prove to be a quiet affair. It will be conducted mostly out of the media spotlight and by the prevailing tradition, meaning that another European male will govern an institution that because of its checkered past is facing serious questions about its future. If the United States and Europe continue to throw away chances for reform, the IMF will become even more marginalized.
Zoellicks World Bank Coronation
It’s all but official. Paul Wolfowitz, the neocon who helped give us the Iraq War only to be sidelined to the World Bank where he ended his presidency mired in a corruption scandal that led to his forced resignation, will officially step down on June 30. The next day, on July 1, he will be replaced by Robert Zoellick, another neocon who advocated invading Iraq in the 1990s. This is a man who ran amok in his role as U.S. Trade Representative.
Chomsky Takes on the World (Bank)
Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. On April 26, Michael Shank interviewed him about the conflict between Congress and the U.S. president over Iraq and Syria, the scandal enveloping World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz, and the nature of foreign debt.
Adios, World Bank!
As the controversy around Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz’s uncertain future as president of the World Bank intensifies, the financial institution is not only losing supporters. It’s also losing victims. In Latin America, countries are paying off their World Bank loans early, cutting off ties with the Bank, and creating their own financing instruments to replace the world’s oldest multilateral lending agency.
IMF Confidence Crisis
As International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank officials engage in their joint semi-annual meetings in Washington, the Fund has a nettlesome new task: convincing its shareholders (most of the world’s governments, represented at the meeting by Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors) that the institution should continue to exist.
Globalization in Retreat
When it first became part of the English vocabulary in the early 1990s, globalization was supposed to be the wave of the future. Fifteen years ago, the writings of globalist thinkers such as Kenichi Ohmae and Robert Reich celebrated the advent of the emergence of the so-called borderless world. The process by which relatively autonomous national economies become functionally integrated into one global economy was touted as “irreversible. ” And the people who opposed globalization were disdainfully dismissed as modern day incarnations of the Luddites that destroyed machines during the Industrial Revolution.
Laos: Power Trumps Reform
There is broad agreement today that a market economy works well within a Western democratic system, but there is much less consensus over whether it can function effectively in an authoritarian state. The contemporary political economy of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) provides an excellent case in point. The Lao experience since the Communist takeover in 1975 suggests real limits to a development model that combines single party rule with market economics.
IMF Identity Crisis
The evidence that its members states are seeking to escape from the International Monetary Fund’s “jurisdiction” continues to mount. Most recently, Uruguay, the IMF’s third largest borrower, became the latest country to announce that it was prepaying its outstanding obligations to the IMF, and the IMF was forced to downgrade the multilateral consultations on global economic imbalances that it had proudly unveiled in April because leading economic powers have proved reluctant to fully engage in these consultations.