CADTM Downgrades Its IMF Rating: A Very Negative Outlook

[The following press release was released by the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt.]

The Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM) has decided to downgrade its rating of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) due to the heavy share of responsibility the IMF has for the deterioration of people’s living standards in countries subjected to austerity policies that it has openly imposed or dictated from behind the scenes. The resulting high levels of unemployment, aggravation of the economic crisis, and the increase in public debt of the States following its counter productive and unjust recommendations justify downgrading the IMF’s rating from NNN to NO- with a further very negative outlook.

The IMF was very active in the Global South since the 1980s and into the 2000s. It imposed "structural adjustment" plans in favor of creditors, thereby encouraging drastic reductions in social spending, massive privatisations, deregulation of the economies and the local markets favouring multinationals rather than local producers. The recipe has been unsavoury.

Totally delegitimized by the social failures of its poisonous remedies, the IMF found itself bordering on bankruptcy between 2007 and 2008 as most of its principal debtors made advance repayments to free themselves from the IMF’s burdensome supervision.

Thanks to the present economic crisis in the European Union, the IMF has managed a come-back in Europe. Back in the saddle with the assistance of Group of Twenty (G20) summits, the IMF has multiplied its lending to Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. These countries—due to their difficult and urgent situation—are forced to compensate by implementing brutal and unjust austerity measures.

The same causes produce the same effects; Europe has now been affected but fortunately the people are not just letting it happen. Even if the IMF wants to make the most of its thirty years of unequalled experience in the safeguarding of private financial interests to the detriment of the people, the emergence of citizens’ public debt audit groups in numerous countries have led the CADTM to downgrade the IMF’s rating and to issue a serious warning.

We hope that citizen resistance movements against the IMF—an institution that is increasingly unpopular and illegitimate—will very soon incite us to downgrade its rating even further.

The CADTM insists on the immediate abolition of the IMF and its replacement by a radically different and democratic institution focused on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs.