The deal with Javier Milei shows how America-first dealmaking is bending global finance to serve authoritarian and extractive ends<\/p>\n
It is famed for hard-nosed bargaining with crisis-hit countries, so why did the International Monetary Fund throw a $20bn lifeline to the serial defaulter Argentina \u2013 despite<\/a> alarm on its board? The answer is that the country\u2019s rightwing leader, Javier Milei<\/a>, is Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cfavourite president\u201d. Amid unease over handing a third of the IMF\u2019s global lending to its largest debtor, the deal passed with $12bn upfront. The IMF has long been intellectually compromised \u2013 promoting stability while enforcing neoliberal orthodoxy. Under Mr Trump, it is ethically compromised too.<\/p>\n Mr Milei\u2019s bailout marks the second Trump-era rescue for Argentina. In 2018, the fund handed Buenos Aires a record $57bn \u2013 but cut it off when its then president, Mauricio Macri, a Trump family friend<\/a>, was not re-elected. That deal now looks nakedly political. With the US holding an effective board veto, the fund\u2019s independence was always fragile. It\u2019s now completely subordinated. A US takeover of the IMF threatens<\/a> deeper instability than any Argentinian default.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The deal with Javier Milei shows how America-first dealmaking is bending global finance to serve authoritarian and extractive ends It is famed for hard-nosed bargaining with crisis-hit countries, so why did the International Monetary Fund throw a $20bn lifeline to the serial defaulter Argentina \u2013 despite alarm on its board? The answer is that the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}