Rethinking FinanceAlternative voices for a new financial architecture

The author, Terry McKinley, Director of CDPR, SOAS, uses a review of a recent widely distributed IMF publication entitled ‘Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy’ to assess the IMF’s claims that it has adopted a more flexible and progressive macroeconomic framework. He concludes that the Fund remains remarkably reluctant to accord national policymakers in client countries any real discretion, or ‘policy space’, in designing ‘development-friendly’ fiscal and monetary policies.

The major obstacles to reforms for safer and sustainable banking are political not technical. The solution is not to insulate reform from elite politics but to promote reform through democratic politics. Broader social representation on committees and regulatory boards is vital if unaccountable elites are to be questioned. But effective representation requires greater knowledge and perspective about what finance is doing and should be doing.

Statement on the financial crisis and the necessary policy responses.

A group of seven highly indebted rich countries (HIRC) of the world have organized a meeting of 20 nations in London next month to discuss the future of the world's finances. They have called to the table some creditor developing countries, such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, some Arab countries, China and India, but have left aside all the world's other surplus countries, creditors to the US and Europe.