ABSTRACT
Today's International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a far different institution than the IMF envisioned by its initial designers, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. It advises countries, assesses their economic policies, co-ordinates lenders in a debt crisis, provides information about member countries, gives emergency loans with conditions to economies in financial distress, promulgates standards, acts as a crisis manager, lends to poor countries at subsidised interest rates, and provides technical assistance. Proposals to reform the institution abound, ranging from one extreme solution of abolishing it altogether to the other extreme solution of transforming into a super fund with the power to create monetary base, set financial regulations, and enforce them world-wide. The IMF's critical shareholders have taken a middle-of-the-road approach, by endorsing the promulgation of financial standards and a mix between public bail-outs and private bail-ins in handling currency and banking crises. So far, there has not been any meaningful implementation of these principles.
