Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

10
Bretton Woods institutions, their underlying mission statement has been the
expansion and integration of a global financial system and market on the US
economic model. These initiatives together created massive markets for
American goods and profits for US businesses that were unrivalled in the
history of the world.
The hidden aim of creating an open world economy unified under US
leadership has set the scene for economic colonisation.
Countries that contribute the most, such as the
If their goal was to relieve poverty, the IMF and World Bank have been
extraordinarily unsuccessful, and as a result they have come in for a huge
amount of criticism. The directors of these two powerful institutions point to
records of loans, construction projects and technical assistance that they say
have helped millions of people in developing countries. However, the large
projects they fund often cause more problems than they solve and end up
simply making the rich richer. In addition, loans come with conditions attached
that force borrower countries to cut social spending and to follow free­market
economic models, which open them up to western corporations and effectively
destroy local industries.
This conditional system of lending has been blamed for the escalation of
Third World debt. Historically, massive loans at low interest rates were
negotiated for developing countries, but when the interest rates skyrocketed the
World Bank and IMF demanded deep structural adjustments to the internal