ABSTRACT
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is one of the three major institutions created at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 to facilitate international economic expansion. After 1971, when the United States ended the global system of fixed exchange rates by refusing to redeem foreign dollars for gold, the International Monetary Fund was left with no clear mandate or reason for existence. Taxpayers in the major industrial countries are once again providing many billions of dollars of additional funding to the International Monetary Fund, as they did in the 1980s, but this time the main purpose is to expand the Fund’s leverage over policies in the former Soviet Union and the rest of Eastern Europe. The International Monetary Fund never makes public the “letter of intent” the borrower signs, which outlines the conditionality to which it agrees.
