IMF Director bemoans Worldwide slow growth, offers suggestions, ignores biggest reason 4 slow growth

[Bill USA]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/04/09/imf-largarde-lift-growth-speech/25512675/

The head of the International Monetary Fund said Thursday that global growth remains "moderate and uneven" and that's "just not good enough" to erase the scars of the Great Recession.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, speaking ahead of next week's IMF-World Bank spring meetings in Washington, D.C., proposed steps governments can take to reduce debt, reform product and labor markets, and promote more cooperation among countries.

Lagarde's speech comes two days after World Bank President Jim Yong Kim told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that slow global economic growth threatened the World Bank's goal of nearly wiping out extreme world poverty by 2030.

Bettering the world economy will be discussed more at next week's IMF-World Bank meetings that will be attended by central bank governors and finance ministers from 188 countries.
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The richest 85 people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5bn. That should be a wake-up call to the deepest sleepers

The richest 85 people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion – or half the world's entire population – put together. This is the stark headline of a report from Oxfam ahead of the World Economic Forum at Davos. Is there a reason why the world's powerful, gathering at the exclusive resort to sip cognac and eat blinis, should care? Well, yes.

If one subscribes to the charitable view that neoliberal philosophy was simply naive or misguided in thinking that "trickle down" would work infinitely, then evidence that it doesn't, should be cause for concern. It is a fundamental building block of supply-side economic theory – the tool of choice these past few decades for those in charge to make adjustments. The realisation that governments have been pulling at economic levers which, for some time, have been attached to nothing, should be a wake-up call to the deepest sleepers.

Even if one subscribes to the cynical view that the elite knew what they were doing all along, observing that the "rising tide" is lifting fewer and fewer boats and leaving more and more to rot in the sediment – both at a personal and national level – must make most wonder "am I in the right boat and is it big enough?" Concentration is rampant. Credit Suisse estimates that the world will have 11 trillionaires within two generations.

It is not so much that the supply-side principle "if you build it, they will come" is no longer true. It is more that we appear to have passed a tipping point, where so much wealth has been concentrated at the top, they no longer need bother to "build" anything. In short, it has become more economically efficient to buy countries' economic policy than to create value in order to sell it on. If one can control government to favour the richest, while raising barriers for new entrants, thus increasing their share of the pie exponentially, what is the incentive to grow the pie?
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[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. If I were the leader of a struggling country, I'd avoid the IMF like the plague.

Better to struggle solo with 'slow growth' than let the vulture capitalists and their pretend altruism take over your country's resources for the benefit of foreign corporations. It's past time to end neocolonial resource theft.

[cascadiance]

2. I still wonder if they went after Dominique Strauss Kahn as the head of IMF for what he was saying..

... earlier in December of 2010 right before he was taken to task for sexual misconduct.

Now, mind you, if he was abusing people in ways he shouldn't, he shouldn't have been given a free pass for that, and should have been made to answer for that. But part of me wonders if he wasn't saying things like the following statements shortly before this incident, if you never would have even heard of this incident, and he might still be in charge of the IMF....

https://www.imf.org/external/np/vc/2010/121210.htm

Finally, may I ask you for your reaction, both on a personal level, as well as head of the IMF, to the demonstrations against you?
DSK: Demonstrations are part of any healthy democracy. It is only natural that some people are unhappy about the changes that need to be made. I understand that. This is a very difficult situation for the Greek people and I do not underestimate the efforts they are making. In fact, I commend them on those efforts--as I believe the rest of the world also is beginning to do. I would only emphasize this point again: when you have to make tough decisions and take difficult measures, it must be done in a socially just manner.From the beginning, we--and the government--have stressed the issue of fairness. Ordinary workers and pensioners have done their part. Now, others in Greek society--including the high-income earners--must do their part too. That Is why, for example, strengthening tax administration, and coming down hard on tax evasion, is so important. Yes, this will help increase needed revenues but, more than this, it will help enhance fairness. I believe that,ultimately, people will support reforms--even very difficult reforms--if they feel they are in the best interest of their country and if everyone is contributing their fair share.

Asking for the upper classes in Greece that have benefitted from unfair and corrupt tax collection processes to pay more as a solution doesn't exactly fit with the "austerity" solution that EU and others want over there.