



And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In the 1990s, few countries were more lionized than Argentina for its efforts to join the club of wealthy nations. Argentina's policies drew enthusiastic applause from the IMF, the World Bank and Wall Street. But the club has a disturbing propensity to turn its back on arrivistes and cast them out. That was what happened in 2001, when Argentina suffered one of the most spectacular crashes in modern history. With it came appalling social and political chaos, a collapse of the peso, and a wrenching downturn that threw millions into poverty and left nearly one-quarter of the workforce unemployed.
Paul Blustein, whose book about the IMF, The Chastening, was called "gripping, often frightening" by The Economist and lauded by the Wall Street Journal as "a superbly reported and skillfully woven story," now gets right inside Argentina's rise and fall in a dramatic account based on hundreds of interviews with top policymakers and financial market players as well as reams of internal documents. He shows how the IMF turned a blind eye to the vulnerabilities of its star pupil, and exposes the conduct of global financial market players in Argentina as redolent of the scandals -- like those at Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing -- that rocked Wall Street in recent years. By going behind the scenes of Argentina's debacle, Blustein shows with unmistakable clarity how sadly elusive the path of hope and progress remains to the great bulk of humanity still mired in poverty and underdevelopment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Argentina's economic boom in the 1990s made it a "poster-child" for the "Washington consensus" of market-oriented reform; when the currency, banking system, economy and a succession of governments all collapsed in 2001, the country became an object lesson in the pitfalls of that model. Journalist Blustein (The Chastening) offers a fine postmortem of the debacle, from a more centrist perspective than the subtitle might suggest. The problem, he contends, lay in Argentina's unsustainable government deficits and its policy of tying the currency to a rigid exchange rate of one peso to the dollar, a measure that ended hyperinflation, but, when the dollar soared, eventually priced Argentinean products out of the market. He criticizes the International Monetary Fund and Wall Street not for imposing austerity, but for indulgently lending Argentina vast sums, despite warning signs, that saddled it with debt and delayed a necessary devaluation and loan restructuring. Blustein's discussion of Argentina's free trade policies and their effects on industry and employment is skimpier than it should be. But working from a colorful inside account of the decision-making processes of the IMF and international investors, he does an admirable job of elucidating the complexities of international finance, currency reform and debt, taking note of their consequences for ordinary people.