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Showing posts from February, 2012

Brown, Southern and in-debt: IMF, ECB and the 'super' powers

The IMF and the South There was a time not so long ago when the kind of bank induced pain being suffered by the Greeks, Irish and Portugese was only felt by those who lived in the South, in places like Jamaica. Those who at the mercy of the IMF and World Bank did what they were told if they wanted to survive economically. When the effects of globalization, the oil crisis, and markets forced open by the predecessor of the WTO meant that island states and other post-colonial economies had to absorb the state-supported production excesses of the North, the USA in particular. We were supposed to want what they had but they seemed to want nothing we had. Except in Jamaica's case: smoke, sex, sand, sea and sun. The Case of Jamaica In that not so long ago, I was a child growing up in Jamaica when at one time during my quite idyllic childhood, the Jamaican dollar was worth more than the US dollar. Bauxite was shipped out for aluminium production in Canada and the USA, bananas he