As President Obama visits Israel, one of the biggest elephants in the room is the ongoing financial crisis just across the desert in Egypt. Since the Arab Spring uprising, Egypt’s economy has deteriorated. The country’s most immediate crisis is a foreign reserve shortage. Stocks of the country’s foreign currency reserves …
Argentina’s government is having a terrible week. The bad week started when the nation was censured by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on February 1 for cooking the statistical books and underreporting the rampant inflation devouring Argentineans’ and foreign investors’ money—to the tune of $6.8 billion. Unless the nation cleans …
Followers of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have long joked that the fund’s acronym stands for “It’s Mostly Fiscal.” For a long time it has helped bail out basket-case economies with severe fiscal deficiencies, such as Greece, Russia, and Argentina. But a recent report shows that the IMF is now …
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde has been talking up the need for greatly expanded resources to bail out ailing European economies. European nations have offered to channel about $200 billion of their own funds to themselves through the IMF (a kind of gentleman’s money-laundering to avoid restrictions in their own …
A dire prediction hit the news yesterday: A date has been set for the end of the “Age of America,” — i.e., when China’s economy will overtake the United States. The news comes by way of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast that shows China’s economy surpassing America’s by 2016. Though there …
The Washington Post reported today that the International Monetary Fund and various world governments warned U.S. officials years ago that “escalating financial problems” in the United States “had to be addressed quickly to forestall a larger threat to the world economy, but those urgings were discounted.” The Post went on …
The proposed €110 billion ($140 billion) Greek rescue package announced on Sunday may well not survive the week. Watching public sector workers storming the Acropolis in protest at proposed government spending cuts and tax increases, raises the question of whether the Greek Government itself can survive. Eurozone countries have agreed …
