How the IMF & World Bank Exploit Poor Countries with Alex Gl

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Alex Gladstein digging into the way the IMF works. I figure most people here already know about it but:

How the IMF & World Bank Exploit Poor Countries with Alex Gladstein

Immediate red flag when one sees that this video is produced by “What Bitcoin Did”. I skipped ahead to the end, which promised to be the bit about Bitcoin, and, sure enough, it’s unhinged conspiracy stuff that has no bearing on reality. The idea that Bitcoin is a stable currency, free from the malign influence of financial policy, is obviously ludicrous if one is aware of the constant fluctuations in Bitcoin.

Are the IMF and the World Bank institutions which have never got anything wrong? No, of course not. But if I wanted a fair and accurate evaluation then I probably wouldn’t look for one from a crypto bro. If I did want to know this man’s views then I’d want them in essay form - I’m not inherently knocking the conversational hour-long video, great if it works for you, but I could gain this information very quickly with an essay but this video would take an hour of concentration.

The IMF bails out countries who have no other way of getting money due to poor financial decisions. Sometimes their bailouts have historically been short-sighted. The accusation that the IMF has been going around systematically destroying currencies seems to me to be a classic example of a story starting with a kernel of truth (IMF bailouts requiring education funding to be cut were a bad idea) and then being built up into something substantially untrue (the IMF systematically destroys currencies and economies). It also seems to be getting cause and effect wrong - countries don’t have broken economies because they asked the IMF and the World Bank for help, they ask for help because their economy is broken.

Gladstein's more an ally than anything else because he likes what it can offer the third world in terms of being able to jump over their local banks and monetary systems. In his case he was an activist first who then liked what he saw in Bitcoin's potential, not an orange-piller who then became an activist.

That's part of why whose doing the interview didn't cancel all interest.

The other thing, very little of it is any more far out than the things John Perkins says. If he's also a mountebank and conspiracy nutter that TED and all sorts of other people love? If so maybe that's part of the problem as well.