Greece: Driven into Crisis  

ZCommunications | Greece: Driven into Crisis | Ingo Schmidt:

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his is ironic inasmuch as the IMF, currently headed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn who served as finance minister in Lionel Jospin's socialist government from 1997 to 1999, recently relaxed its long-time opposition against capital controls. An IMF policy paper published in February 2010 declared that countries that have capital controls in place fared much better during the financial crisis than countries that did not have them. Moreover, IMF chief-economist Olivier Blanchard openly plays with the idea of raising the inflation target for central banks to give them more leeway for monetary policies and also to ease debt burdens at least to some extent. Not surprisingly, the European Central Bank (ECB), which has neoliberal monetarist principles enshrined in its statute, rejects this Keynesian brew served by French economists