unholy trinity the imf world bank and wto

[...]... of the IMF and the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank Simon had previously been 18  |  One • • • • a partner at Salomon Brothers, a prominent Wall Street investment banking firm, and was active in the Investment Bankers Association of America James A Baker III, secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan admin­ istration between 1985 and 1988, previously with the. .. investment banking, acting most forcefully through the US Treasury Department, as well as through direct consultation, and deriving ideas and talent from the elite universities, have greatly influenced, even determined, the formation of policy in the IMF World Bank WTO governance complex (For example, at the September 2002 meetings of the IMF and World Bank ‘international bankers, investment executives and other... starting in the mid-1970s for the IMF and the late 1970s for the World Bank, the controlling faction of economic belief shifted to the right under the combined impetus of two growing tendencies The first was a change in the discipline of economics away from Keynesianism and toward a neoclassicism influenced by the Austrian School’s trust in markets, as opposed to state regulation, and by the monetarist theories... of the key players, in terms of the knowledge and expertise that they brought to bear and, more controversially, in terms of the interests they served, the ‘Washington Consensus’ might more accurately be described as the Washington–Wall Street Alliance, an institutional complex centered on the US Treasury Department, the IMF and the World Bank, with an intellectual offshoot to Harvard University and. .. the Harvard Business School, whose MBA, doctoral and executive education programs train the corporate and banking elites, but with the leading role being played by Wall Street bankers, especially investment bankers Investment banking is a specialized part of the US banking industry, created by the Bank Act of 1933, more commonly known as the Glass–Steagall Act The Act was supposed to separate the banking... elsewhere The World Bank and the IMF operate primarily as bankers to the central banks of nation-states Banks have power over policy formation because they control access to capital accumulations And capital accumulations are institutionally controlled by commercial and investment banks These banks are headquartered outside Washington in commercial cities such as New York, Boston, London, Zurich and Tokyo... meant the political Washington of the US Congress and senior members of the administration, and the technocratic Washington of the international financial institutions, the economic agencies of the US government, the Federal Reserve Board and the think tanks, such as the one at which he himself works And by ‘policy’ he meant policy instruments rather than more general objectives or eventual outcomes The. .. that was broadly con­ sonant with the interests of the financial community.’ Let us expand on these brief allusions by following some connections to the Wall Street financial community When we look at the actors crucial in setting up the neoliberal economic policies used for more than twenty years by the World Bank and the IMF, and when we glimpse beneath the surface of WTO policy-making (courtesy especially... regulate the economy not merely in its own (state) interest, as with the earlier mercantilism, but for the benefit of the great majority of the peoples of the Western democracies In other words, the bourgeois liberal state of the nineteenth century was forced by crisis, protest, wars and enfranchisement to become, by the mid-twentieth century, the liberal (‘New Deal’) state in the United States and the socially... effectively a world of consumers Finance capital concentrated in New York, London and a few other global cities could more efficiently invest, disinvest, speculate and operate in every corner of the world And global governance institutions, such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) , might bring huge swathes of entire continents under the same pernicious, undemocratic control So rather . TRINITY the IMF, World Bank and WTO Richard Peet second edition Zed Books  ·   Unholy Trinity: the IMF, World Bank and WTO was first published in  by Zed Books Ltd,  Cynthia. institutions – the International Monet ary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organiza- tion – set in the historical context of a study of the Bretton Woods agreement, and in the ideological. later called ‘four magic numbers’ representing the labor needed to produce wine and cloth in Portugal and England, became established as the classical source of the theory of comparative ad- vantage