Tak habis habis nak kaitkan ngan bail out kroni....
Lantak la ...
yg penting masa tue...rakyat tak terseksa....
ekonomi kita pulih cepat....
Daripada pinjam IMF
aku terseksa barang...
samala cam balaci yg dok kaitkan DSAI sebagai agent asing sebab cadag pakai IMF Argentina is just the latest example of how IMF policies have failed to establish the basis for long-term economic growth in low-income countries. IMF policies usually do succeed in curtailing inflation, as they did in Argentina in the mid-1990s, because sharp cuts in government spending and restrictions on the money supply tend to yield reduced price increases. Also, as the Argentine case illustrates, adopting IMF programs can open the door to large influxes of foreign loans-from the Fund itself, the World Bank, the governments of the United States and other high-income countries, and (with the IMF's approval) internationally operating banks. But nowhere, including Argentina, has the IMF policy package led to stable, sustained economic expansion.
What IMF policies do often lead to, though, is growing inequality. Officially, the IMF laments that its policies specifically reductions in government spending-have a severe negative impact on low-income groups (because they generate high rates of unemployment and lead to the gutting of social programs). Yet IMF officials rationalize their mania for spending cuts in times of crisis by claiming that balanced budgets are the foundation of long-term economic stability and growth.
Nonsense. In recessions, moderate government deficits, like those in Argentina in recent years, are a desirable policy because they boost spending, which counteracts the downturn; balanced budgets in such circumstances tend to exacerbate downturns. Also, curtailing social spending-on education, health care, infrastructure projects-cuts the legs out from under long-term economic progress.
Yet the IMF sticks to its policies, probably because those policies serve important and powerful interests in the U.S. and world economies. The IMF is controlled by the governments of the high-income countries that finance its operations. The U.S. government, with over 18% of the voting shares in the Fund, has by far the greatest influence. Indeed, over the years, the IMF has operated largely as a branch of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, attempting to create a context that assures the well-being of U.S. interests-which is to say the interests of U.S.-based internationally operating firms. Since the same context serves the interests of firms based in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, the U.S. government generally has the support of its allied governments in directing the IMF.
To serve those interests, the IMF tells governments that a key to economic growth lies in providing unrestricted access for imports and foreign investment. In fact, virtually all experience suggests the opposite. Britain, the United States, Japan, the countries of Western Europe, Taiwan, South Korea-all built the foundations for successful economic growth not on "free trade," but on government regulation of trade. The IMF gets around the inconvenient facts of history by conflating free trade with extensive engagement in the international economy. But the two are not the same. Yes, successful development has always been accompanied by extensive international engagement, but through regulated commerce, not free trade.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the IMF pushed governments in low-income countries to liberalize their capital markets, claiming that capital controls were anathema to development. Then came 1997, when the open capital markets of East Asian countries were instruments of disaster. In the aftermath of 1997, it seemed clear that the real winners from open capital markets were financial firms based in the United States and other high-income countries.
These same financial firms have also been the winners of another component in the IMF policy package. "Fiscal responsibility," according to the IMF, means that governments must give the highest priority to repaying their international debts. However, experience does not support the contention that, when governments fail to pay foreign debts, they bring on financial disaster. Instead, experience suggests that, at times, defaulting on foreign debt can be an effective, positive policy option. It is the banks operating out of New York and other financial centers, not people in low-income countries, that gain from giving first priority to debt repayment.
The IMF's advocacy of privatization offers one more way to open the world economy more fully to U.S.-based firms. When state enterprises in low-income countries are sold, they are often bought by large internationally operating firms, able to move in quickly with their huge supply of capital. Of course, in Argentina and elsewhere, local business groups have often benefited directly from privatization, sometimes on their own and sometimes as junior partners of firms based abroad. Either way, this enlargement of the private sphere works in favor of private firms. The problem here is not that privatization is always inappropriate, but simply that, contrary to IMF nostrums, it is not always appropriate. Privatization is especially problematic when it only replaces an inefficient government monopoly with a private monopoly yielding huge profits for its owners. Moreover, the record from Mexico City to Moscow demonstrates that privatization is often a hugely corrupt process. page mendap :o:o up kan thread nie, page mendap!!! Stiglizt comment when asked about IMF performance in East Asia
We saw in East Asia, Latin America, Russia and Africa how they made things worse. Unequivocally. In East Asia, the country that did not take IMF advice, Malaysia, had the shortest and shallowest downturn and the least legacy of debt. The country that was best in managing the IMF in some way, Korea, recovered the fastest. The countries that took the medicine - Thailand and Indonesia - had the worst performance.
[ Last edited bymshafiz at 4-4-2008 10:56 PM ] http://www.jeffooi.com/IMF_Suharto_00-10-21nyt.jpg
Presiden Indonesia Menandatangani Perjanjian dengan IMF/World Bank,
Apa jadi selepas tu?? semua da jadi sejarah. Look at whats happening to Zimbabwe now excluding politics wise..its inflating way out of control after the IMF pulled the plug on it..to buy a loaf of bread it costs 50 million zimbabwe dollars today...prices are increasing in regards to the zimbabwe dollar on a daily basis..classic case of runaway inflation.
Comments from Stiglitz about Thailand
The global economic crisis began in Thailand, on July 2, 1997. The countries of East Asia were coming off a miraculous three decades: incomes had soared, health had improved, poverty had fallen dramatically. Not only was literacy now universal, but, on international science and math tests, many of these countries outperformed the United States. Some had not suffered a single year of recession in 30 years.But the seeds of calamity had already been planted. In the early '90s, East Asian countries had liberalized their financial and capital markets--not because they needed to attract more funds (savings rates were already 30 percent or more) but because of international pressure, including some from the U.S. Treasury Department. These changes provoked a flood of short-term capital--that is, the kind of capital that looks for the highest return in the next day, week, or month, as opposed to long-term investment in things like factories. In Thailand, this short-term capital helped fuel an unsustainable real estate boom. And, as people around the world (including Americans) have painfully learned, every real estate bubble eventually bursts, often with disastrous consequences. Just as suddenly as capital flowed in, it flowed out. And, when everybody tries to pull their money out at the same time, it causes an economic problem. A big economic problem.
The last set of financial crises had occurred in Latin America in the 1980s, when bloated public deficits and loose monetary policies led to runaway inflation. There, the IMF had correctly imposed fiscal austerity (balanced budgets) and tighter monetary policies, demanding that governments pursue those policies as a precondition for receiving aid. So, in 1997 the IMF imposed the same demands on Thailand. Austerity, the fund's leaders said, would restore confidence in the Thai economy. As the crisis spread to other East Asian nations--and even as evidence of the policy's failure mounted--the IMF barely blinked, delivering the same medicine to each ailing nation that showed up on its doorstep.
I thought this was a mistake. For one thing, unlike the Latin American nations, the East Asian countries were already running budget surpluses. In Thailand, the government was running such large surpluses that it was actually starving the economy of much-needed investments in education and infrastructure, both essential to economic growth. And the East Asian nations already had tight monetary policies, as well: inflation was low and falling. (In South Korea, for example, inflation stood at a very respectable four percent.) The problem was not imprudent government, as in Latin America; the problem was an imprudent private sector--all those bankers and borrowers, for instance, who'd gambled on the real estate bubble.
Under such circumstances, I feared, austerity measures would not revive the economies of East Asia--it would plunge them into recession or even depression. High interest rates might devastate highly indebted East Asian firms, causing more bankruptcies and defaults. Reduced government expenditures would only shrink the economy further.
So I began lobbying to change the policy. I talked to Stanley Fischer, a distinguished former Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor and former chief economist of the World Bank, who had become the IMF's first deputy managing director. I met with fellow economists at the World Bank who might have contacts or influence within the IMF, encouraging them to do everything they could to move the IMF bureaucracy.
Convincing people at the World Bank of my analysis proved easy; changing minds at the IMF was virtually impossible ... It was maddening, not just because the IMF's inertia was so hard to stop but because, with everything going on behind closed doors, it was impossible to know who was the real obstacle to change ... I shouldn't have been surprised. The IMF likes to go about its business without outsiders asking too many questions. In theory, the fund supports democratic institutions in the nations it assists. In practice, it undermines the democratic process by imposing policies. Officially, of course, the IMF doesn't "impose" anything. It "negotiates" the conditions for receiving aid. But all the power in the negotiations is on one side--the IMF's--and the fund rarely allows sufficient time for broad consensus-building or even widespread consultations with either parliaments or civil society. Sometimes the IMF dispenses with the pretense of openness altogether and negotiates secret covenants.
When the IMF decides to assist a country, it dispatches a "mission" of economists. These economists frequently lack extensive experience in the country; they are more likely to have firsthand knowledge of its five-star hotels than of the villages that dot its countryside. They work hard, poring over numbers deep into the night. But their task is impossible. In a period of days or, at most, weeks, they are charged with developing a coherent program sensitive to the needs of the country. Needless to say, a little number-crunching rarely provides adequate insights into the development strategy for an entire nation. Even worse, the number-crunching isn't always that good. The mathematical models the IMF uses are frequently flawed or out-of-date. Critics accuse the institution of taking a cookie-cutter approach to economics, and they're right. Country teams have been known to compose draft reports before visiting. I heard stories of one unfortunate incident when team members copied large parts of the text for one country's report and transferred them wholesale to another. They might have gotten away with it, except the "search and replace" function on the word processor didn't work properly, leaving the original country's name in a few places. Oops.
It's not fair to say that IMF economists don't care about the citizens of developing nations. But the older men who staff the fund--and they are overwhelmingly older men--act as if they are shouldering Rudyard Kipling's white man's burden. IMF experts believe they are brighter, more educated, and less politically motivated than the economists in the countries they visit. In fact, the economic leaders from those countries are pretty good--in many cases brighter or better-educated than the IMF staff, which frequently consists of third-rank students from first-rate universities. (Trust me: I've taught at Oxford University, MIT, Stanford University, Yale University, and Princeton University, and the IMF almost never succeeded in recruiting any of the best students.)
The IMF pressed ahead, demanding reductions in government spending. And so subsidies for basic necessities like food and fuel were eliminated at the very time when contractionary policies made those subsidies more desperately needed than ever ... Not only was the IMF not restoring economic confidence in East Asia, it was undermining the region's social fabric. And then, in the spring and summer of 1998, the crisis spread beyond East Asia to the most explosive country of all--Russia.
Today, Russia remains in desperate shape. High oil prices and the long-resisted ruble devaluation have helped it regain some footing. But standards of living remain far below where they were at the start of the transition. The nation is beset by enormous inequality, and most Russians, embittered by experience, have lost confidence in the free market. A significant fall in oil prices would almost certainly reverse what modest progress has been made.
East Asia is better off, though it still struggles, too. Close to 40 percent of Thailand's loans are still not performing; Indonesia remains deeply mired in recession. Unemployment rates remain far higher than they were before the crisis, even in East Asia's best-performing country, Korea. IMF boosters suggest that the recession's end is a testament to the effectiveness of the agency's policies. Nonsense. Every recession eventually ends. All the IMF did was make East Asia's recessions deeper, longer, and harder. Indeed, Thailand, which followed the IMF's prescriptions the most closely, has performed worse than Malaysia and South Korea, which followed more independent courses.
I was often asked how smart--even brilliant--people could have created such bad policies. One reason is that these smart people were not using smart economics. Time and again, I was dismayed at how out-of-date--and how out-of-tune with reality--the models Washington economists employed were. For example, microeconomic phenomena such as bankruptcy and the fear of default were at the center of the East Asian crisis. But the macroeconomic models used to analyze these crises were not typically rooted in microfoundations, so they took no account of bankruptcy.
But bad economics was only a symptom of the real problem: secrecy. Smart people are more likely to do stupid things when they close themselves off from outside criticism and advice. (jangan jadi mcm nie OK!) If there's one thing I've learned in government, it's that openness is most essential in those realms where expertise seems to matter most. Anybody who thinks that IMF, WTO, World bank are financial or trade bodies are grossly mistaken..they were formed with politics in mind and political objectives are their practise. personally, aku rasa ramai yang nak promote diri sendiri macam perasan bagus je.dah la taksub kat satu pandangan saja tanpa ada niat nak be objective dan analytically tengokboth sides of the coin.konon cakap pasal ekonomi, konon quote pandangan tapi dari hanya sorang, konon itu-ini tak betul, konon forummers lain tak reti akaun/ekonomi...
apa sangat la profession economist tu in corporate world;P :lol:
samada ambik tidak ambil loan imf atau ambil, tang mana yang tak betul, tang mana kesan yang akan timbul kalau perkara tak betul dibuat, tang mana yang akan menimpa rakyat, etc etc etc, takde pulak berani nak specify kan.
shallow-minded dan tunnel-visioned.petty minds.petty minds take small things and make it big to impress other petty minds.dan petty minds senang take umbrage bila baca posting aku ni...;P :lol: lemme be a mirror tonite..:) Originally posted by Gemukkkkkkk at 4-4-2008 11:09 PM http://forum6.cari.com.my/images/common/back.gif
personally, aku rasa ramai yang nak promote diri sendiri macam perasan bagus je.dah la taksub kat satu pandangan saja tanpa ada niat nak be objective dan analytically tengokboth sides of the...
Does your mind have anything nice to share? :$ :$ Originally posted by Gemukkkkkkk at 4-4-2008 11:09 PM http://forum4.cari.com.my/images/common/back.gif
lantak kau lah labu ;P:lol:
kau buat lawak ke petang2 rembang nie (kat sini still petang yea) tentang economists tak penting? :lol: :lol:
economic policy penting untuk pembangunan negara, kalau tak pandai economics kau tahu ke apa nak buat? :o :o
peg kan RM tu USD, capital control, protect infant industries kau tahu?
yang korang tahu, pasal politik ajer :I
itu memang nyata walaupun as you claimed economists nie takde sumbangan dlm corporate world
tapi berjaya kah firms kalau takde economics policy yg stimulate growth/ protect industry?
kalau tak directly, indirectly memang menyumbang ;P ;P
kau nak ckp pasal apa lagi, punya byk benda dah dibincangkan
free market liberalisation, privatisation, currency effects semua telah nampak dekat negara2 lain yang ambik IMF
aku letak stiglitz sebab dia resigned in protest kerana IMF policies, dia jugak nobel prize winner.. kau ada? :lol: :lol:
kau nak aku ambik semua kenyataan economists dunia ke letak sini baru kau nak keluar dari tempurung? :lol: :lol:
tapi aku faham lah pemikiran macam kau, tak boleh tgk orang lebih, kena kau jer betul dan pandai ;P :lol:
[ Last edited bymshafiz at 5-4-2008 01:34 AM ] hang keluokan je valid stats berapa ramai sokong imf vs xsokong..
aku rasa ramai sokong imf tu org mesia kot.. :lol:
The good and bad of IMF policies
Section 2: Theories/ Debates and Contributors1. Conditionality and National Sovereignty
One of the major debates surrounding the issue of aid packages is the extent to which the conditionality serves to undermine the national autonomy.This is relevant because of the fact that national governments are required to pursue policies and institute changes which they would not necessarily do on their own volition.The structural adjustment and stabilization policies are tough changes, which may create some measure of hardship for the locals, thus making the policies politically undesirable to the governments.However, IFIs suggest that the constraints involved are only short-term and are necessary for long-term economic development and stability.Further, financial assistance is granted on condition that these changes are instituted.While many critics suggest that on this basis, conditionality erodes national autonomy, this issue must be examined in its context. In principle, conditionality can undermine a state抯 autonomy.For small, weak states which may lack the institutional and technical capacity to develop their own economic programmes, there is a greater opportunity for IFIs to exert leverage.Such national agencies concede their autonomy by transferring to the IFIs the power to determine and direct their economic policy agenda (Stallings 1992: 57).Generally, one would expect that as sovereign states they have a choice in the matter and if doubtful of the conditions they would not enter into such arrangements.However, in the context of the immense pressure placed on these states by the 搖nited front Conditionality
an exchange of policy changes for external financing, whether debt rescheduling or relief, multilateral credits, bilateral loans or grants. (Miles Kahler, 1992)
in simple terms, compromising of sovereignty/ autonomy by adopting 搑ational policies
Reply #113 mshafiz's post
thanx hafiz for da info...actually ramai tak sedar kepentingan economist...
klau kat u pun berapa keratlah yg amik course ni pun...
that's why ramai sgt yg berlagak pandai...
plus bodoh sombong...
kekonon tahu sgt...
harga barang naik pun dah start mengelabah...
kena beli buku teks anak pun dah komplen...
bayar yuran sekolah lebih dah masuk tv...
ni belum lagi amik IMF...
macam South Korea...
memang dia maju...
tapi taraf hidup diorg amat tinggi...
macam Thailand pulak...
maju ek...
maju sangat sampai pergolakan kat selatan Thailand tak settle sampai sekarang...
tak guna maju kalau keadaan dalam negara sendiri tak aman... Originally posted by pessona at 4-4-2008 11:30 PM http://forum6.cari.com.my/images/common/back.gif
hang keluokan je valid stats berapa ramai sokong imf vs xsokong..
aku rasa ramai sokong imf tu org mesia kot.. :lol:
tak kuasa aku nak pi buat research pasal statistics plak :P
itu semua research paper from kwn2 aku
ada pro and con about IMF (dah tadi kata bias from one side of the coin jer kan?)
diambil/ extracted from beberapa economics journal
bacalah sendiri, pikir baik buruk :P Originally posted by mariss at 5-4-2008 12:06 AM http://forum6.cari.com.my/images/common/back.gif
thanx hafiz for da info...
actually ramai tak sedar kepentingan economist...
klau kat u pun berapa keratlah yg amik course ni pun...
that's why ramai sgt yg berlagak pandai...
plus bodoh somb ...
no problem :D :D
tapi yang malas nak post tu sebab "someone" is being judgemental about people
if we put in extra effort to make people realise and understand the whole situation
dia kata kita berlagak bagus and tunjuk pandai
mcm tu mana nak maju? tak boleh terima ilmu org lain
diri sendiri jer rasa betul dan pandai :lol: :lol:
mungkin pandai sgt pun, economists tak penting
rakyat Malaysia semua jgn jadi economists tau, takde kepentingan ;P ;P :lol: :lol:
tadbir jer negara melalui ilmu haiwan atau kemahiran hidup ;P ;P
Reply #118 mshafiz's post
masalahnyer...nak ker diorg baca...
especially yang panjang berjela...
baru berapa kerat pun dah malas nak baca...
nak suruh org lain terangkan...
rakyat malaysia ni kan malas membaca...
biarlah diorg ngan perception sendiri...