Too soft, too open, too democratic?

["Gary Santos" <evs@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stranger than fiction. . .

http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2096926

HAS the International Monetary Fund gone soft? Is the World Trade
Organisation too open? Is the World Bank soon to be "owned" not by its
shareholders, but by its borrowers? None of these questions was on the
official agenda at the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in
Dubai this past week, but all of them are in the air. On Saturday September
20th, the IMF officially agreed to roll over a large loan to Argentina
without asking much of the government in return. Argentina's private
creditors were outraged: it was as if the debtor had broken the repo man's
thumbs. A few days earlier, a group of poor African nations, accounting for
a tiny proportion of the world's trade, helped to trigger the collapse of
the world trade talks in Cancún, Mexico, throwing the entire WTO into
disarray. Undeterred by this spectacle, the shareholders of the World Bank
this week talked about giving poor countries a greater say in the bank's
policies, even though they are as likely to borrow from the Bank as to
contribute to it. ---more click on link---