On 3/23/2012 8:48 PM, Jim Devine wrote: > All else constant, if the WB started helping people in a way that hurt > business interests and/or neoliberal ideology (such as dropping the > fees at medical clinics in poor countries) it would reduce confidence > in those bonds (while cutting fees would reduce WB cash flow)...
Jim, I'd see the WB in bigger terms: the 'brain' of neoliberalism (the IMF being the fist). There's no straight correlation from WB advice to raise user fees, to WB loan repayment rates. The WB's legitimacy has waxed and waned - there was a high point under Wolfensohn yet that was also the time, in April 2000, that we saw the USA's largest-ever protest against the Bank and a World Bank Bonds Boycott (that Bob N. helped strategize) generating severe pressure, albeit not enough to threaten the AAA rating. That was one of the campaigns that anti-apartheid guru Dennis Brutus most strenuously advocated, using the SA disinvestment model, and he even persuaded TIAA-CREF to sell its three WB bonds at a 2003 Annual General Meeting. But frankly, we failed at that effort, and if a reformer can come to the WB and finally discipline health-care capitalists and pharmacorps who are still (maybe even more with India going towards IP rights) ripping off the Third World, that would indeed be a huge step forward... but I wonder if anyone has looked at whether these kinds of elite interventions by people with lefty training - e.g. Paul Farmer as deputy UN administrator of Haiti - do any good in terms of institutional repositioning... or will we just see it as a flash in the pan. > We already have a lot of people yelling that _the_ reason for the > housing bubble and the 2007-08 financial crisis was that the USG > encouraged relatively poor people to buy houses they couldn't afford. > (It's Fannie and Freddie -- and the community development act -- that > did the financial system in!!) Tiny semantic correction: Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 Cheers, Patrick (qualification: first person ever hired by a US banking regulator to reinforce the CRA as a full-time job - so as to pay my college bills, 1983-85; yup, it took them six years to get serious) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
