IMF

The One Percent Rallies Behind IMF Director Christine Lagarde

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lagardePaul Craig Roberts – Washington removed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the leading contender for the French presidency and as director of the IMF by framing him on phony charges of raping a New York hotel maid. The obviously false charge was proven to be totally fabricated and had to be dropped. In the meantime Strass-Kahn had been forced to resign from the IMF and to drop out of the French election. Washington regarded Strauss-Kahn as insufficiently compliant with Washington’s agendas and moved him aside.

Washington got its vassal, Hollande, elected President of France, and replaced Strauss-Kahn at the IMF with the “rhymes-with-witch” Christine LaGarde.

LaGarde serves only the One Percent. She overturned the decision by the IMF’s professional staff that the Greek debt had to be written down to a sum that the country could afford to service. Instead, LaGarde enabled the One Percent to loot the Greek nation and the Greek people, forcing many young Greek women into prostitution in order to have money for food.

As Stephen Lendman points out below, LaGarde’s crimes have caught up with her. When she was French finance minister she ruled against the interest of France in order to benefit the tycoon Bernard Tapie. Corrupt prosecutors tried to cover it up, but the French judicial system has ruled that she must stand trial. http://www.wsj.com/articles/imf-chief-lagarde-ordered-to-stand-trial-in-france-1450373023 Despite the judicial order that she stand trial, she has not had to resign as IMF director. The One Percent protects its own. The IMF’s executive board “continues to express its confidence in the Managing Director’s ability to effectively carry out her duties.”

No such expression of confidence was given to Strauss-Kahn when he was arrested on obviously false charges. Continue reading →

Why the IMF’s “historic” decision about China is irrelevant… and hilarious!

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renminbi Simon Black – They called it a “historic moment in international finance”.

And so with great fanfare, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced yesterday that they would be including China’s renminbi in the basket of currencies that comprise their institutional monetary unit, the SDR.

The IMF invented the SDR back in 1969 to be used as a foreign exchange reserve held by governments and central banks.

Now, the SDR is nothing fancy. It’s really only something that economists and central bankers fawn over, with no real impact on anyone else.

Even the IMF considers the SDR’s role in international financial markets to be “insignificant”.

But that’s not all that makes the IMFs decision completely irrelevant.

For starters, just look at how they reconfigured the percentage weights of other currencies in the SDR basket to make room for the renminbi.

The British pound’s weight in the SDR will fall from 11% to 8%, the Japanese Yen from 9% to 8%, the Euro from 37% to 31%.

Conspicuously absent from this list of demotions is the United States dollar, which maintains a rock-solid 42% weighting.

In doing this, the IMF proves itself to be nothing more than a lapdog of the US.

More importantly, who cares about the SDR?

The market has already been rapidly adopting the renminbi for years.

It is today already the fourth most widely used currency in all international payments. And the renminbi ranks second for global issuances in letters of credit. Continue reading →

The Chinese Yuan is Now An IMF Reserve Currency: Here’s What It Means

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James Corbett – As expected, the IMF Executive Board has officially added the yuan to its Special Drawing Rights basket. The Chinese currency will enter the SDR basket from October 1st, 2016 and will be given a net weight of 10.92% of the basket, making it the third most valuable component of the SDR behind the dollar and the euro.

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In a press release from the IMF Monday, Managing Director Christine Lagarde was quoted as saying:

“The Executive Board’s decision to include the RMB in the SDR basket is an important milestone in the integration of the Chinese economy into the global financial system. It is also a recognition of the progress that the Chinese authorities have made in the past years in reforming China’s monetary and financial systems. The continuation and deepening of these efforts will bring about a more robust international monetary and financial system, which in turn will support the growth and stability of China and the global economy.”

For those not conversant in globalist mouthpiece gobbledygook, Lagarde is essentially saying: “Good work, China! You’ve proven yourself to be pliant and flexible, and a willing stooge for the globalist bigwigs. Here’s your seat at the table.”

As we’ve discussed before in these pages, the SDR is a reserve currency administered by the IMF. Central banks with SDRs in their reserve accounts can convert those SDRs into one of four currencies: dollars, euros, pounds or yen. As of next October, SDRs will also be convertible into yuan.

So what does this mean? It means that the yuan is now effectively a world reserve currency. Not the world reserve currency; that’s still the dollar, a position that isn’t likely to change for a few years yet. But regardless, the effect will be immediate and profound. Earlier this year AXA Investment Managers estimated that as much as a trillion dollars worth of Chinese bonds will be sold by the end of the decade as a result of the reallocation of global reserve assets that will take place because of this decision.

Inclusion in the IMF’s big boy’s club has not come without a cost, of course. In its scramble to live up to the SDR inclusion criteria of being “widely used” and “freely usable,” as well as to liberalize its financial system, China has experienced some enormous shockwaves in its economy this year. China’s moves toward interest rate liberalization and other measures designed to remove stringent government controls from the economy have exacerbated the problems in an already precarious economy.  The liberalization measures have even been pointed to as one of the factors in China’s stock market meltdown this summer.

But ultimately the IMF’s decision should come as a shock to no one. The Chinese oligarchs have been fully on board with the New World Order agenda for generations and the People’s Bank of China governor used the occasion of the Lehman Bros. meltdown to call for making the SDR itself the world reserve currency. And with the BRICS bank pledging cooperative action and sharing board members with the IMF itself, China’s fealty to the IMF world order is not really in question.

China has shown it can jump through the NWO hoops, and now it is receiving its prize.

SF Source Corbett Report  Nov 2015

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Meet the Secretive Committees that Run the Global Economy

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globalAndrew Gavin Marshall  – There exists an overlapping and highly integrated network of institutions, committees and secret meetings of ad-hoc groups that collectively run the global economy. This network consists of finance ministries, central banks, international organizations and the various conferences and confabs that bring them together. This network is responsible for facilitating global financial diplomacy and managing the architecture of global financial governance. In short: it is the most powerful and informal political structure in the world.

With the United States at the center of the system, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank are the two most important American institutions in global financial governance – and the Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairperson are the world’s two most powerful financial diplomats. Both institutions are headquartered in Washington, D.C., just down the street from the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Group, two global financial bodies created in 1944 to manage the world economy on behalf of the rich Western nations that founded them.

Twice a year, the IMF and the World Bank host large international conferences. The Spring Membership Meeting, typically held in April, and the Annual membership meeting draw a crowd consisting of most of the finance ministers and central bank governors from the IMF’s 188 member nations, representing the Fund’s Governing Board. They descend on D.C. where the meetings are typically held (though occasionally they are hosted in other countries as well), and draw scores of journalists, academics and thousands of bankers and financiers who are eager to meet, greet, wine, dine and make deals with the political decision-makers of the global economy.

The top five shareholders of the IMF (United States, Japan, Germany, France and U.K.) reflect the membership of an ad-hoc group of finance ministers that began meeting in 1973, thereafter known as the Group of Five (G-5). At the time, U.S. Treasury Secretary George Shultz described the group as “a channel for informal and very frank communication on monetary and other issues, both of a long-term and more immediate character.” But the G-5 was hardly the first of such groups. Continue reading →

What Would Happen If Everyone Joins China In Dumping Treasuries?

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chinaKatherine Frisk – If China sells off US Treasuries and buys back yuan what does it mean?

In recent years China and Russia have been increasing their gold holdings. In July the Peoples Bank of China declared their gold holdings as part of an agreement to join the IMF and for the yuan to be included in the SDR.  

On the one hand many expressed surprise that their holdings were “so high,” on the other hand, those who have been watching the flood of gold move from west to east in the last four years are well aware that the figures given by the PBOC did not disclose all of China’s gold holdings but merely those holdings that needed to be declared for the purposes of joining the IMF.

Not only has China accumulated much more than the declared  53.3 million ounces, this figure does not represent gold holdings in other major Chinese banks or gold held in the hands of private individuals. In China you can go to an ATM machine and exchange your paper money for a chocolate bar size of gold.  In other words, the average middle class Chinese family as in India, regards gold as an important and necessary part of their investment portfolio. The Chinese and the Indians do not hold much store in GLD certificates, the paper gold market, as they see this as valueless in real terms and subject to market manipulation, high frequency trading and gold price rigging. 

Yet again China was turned down by the IMF and treated like a third class citizen of the world in spite of the fact that China is one of the world’s leading economies. In recent years China has joined the BRICS development bank and formed the AIIB for the purposes of creating investment banks that will service development in Russia, India, Africa and South America and the planned Silk Road Project, a project of massive proportions that will include the whole of Eurasia in trade and commerce with an arterial system of fast speed rail that will eventually connect Beijing and Lisbon. Continue reading →