My thoughts on Damus last update, sorry, I'm a free soul 💜

New book dropped today

Last year I started digging into the IMF and World Bank a little bit and was surprised that there were so few approachable books on the topic

This led me to keep digging, which led to a massive rabbit hole of archived essays and reports, interviews, and discontinued books going back 70 years all the way to the creation of the institutions at the end of WWII

What I started to realize as I learned — which became the thesis of the book — is that the IMF and World Bank actually exploit poor countries, they do not help them

This has mostly been achieved by working with dictators and corrupt officials to plunge emerging market countries into debt they can never pay back

Western lenders get paid back plus interest, and benefit from a massive economic engineering where entire societies are re-architected to suit the needs of rich nations instead of achieving industry and sovereignty

The Bank and Fund are known as charitable or maybe as flawed but necessary

In reality their operations are straightforwardly neocolonial, and they help subsidize the way of life in the West by depressing wages and looting resources in the global south

The book was a huge wake up call for me, I hope you can find it useful too

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