The Shock Doctrine: Pseudo-Crisis page 260 [View All]

For years, there had been rumors that the international financial institutions had been dabbling in the art of "pseudo-crisis," as Williamson put it, in order to bend countries to their will, but it was difficult to prove. The most extensive testimony came from Davison Budhoo, an IMF staffer turned whistle-blower, who accused the organization of cooking the books in order to doom the economy of a poor but strong-willed country.

Budhoo was a Grenadian-born, London School of Economics-trained economist who stood out in Washington thanks to an unconventional approach to personal style: he let his hair stand on end, a la Albert Einstein, and preferred the windbreaker to the pinstripe suit. He had worked for the IMF for twelve years, where his job was designing structural adjustment programs for Africa, Latin America and his native Carribean. After the organization took its sharp right turn during the Reagan/Thatcher era, the independant-minded Budhoo felt increasingly ill at ease in his place of work. The fund was packed with zealous Chicago Boys under the leadership of its managing director, the staunch neoliberal Michel Camdessus. When Budhoo quit in 1988, he decided to devote himself to exposing the secrets of his former workplace. It began when he wrote a remarkable letter to Camdessus, adopting the j'accuse tone of Andre Gunder Frank's letters to Friedman a decade earlier.

Showing an enthusiasm for language rare for senior fund economists, the letter began: "Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medicine and your bag of tricks to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Carribbean and in Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind's eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples....The blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name."

He then went on to build his case. Budhoo accused the fund of using statistics as "lethal" weapons. He exhaustively documented how, as a fund employee in the mid-eighties, he was involved in elaborate "statistical malpractices" to exaggerate the numbers in IMF reports on oil-rich Trinidad and Tobago in order to make the country look far less stable than it actually was. Budhoo contended that the IMF had more than doubled a crucial statistic measuring the labor costs in the country, making it appear highly unproductive-even though, as he had said, the fund had the correct information on hand. In another instance, he claimed that the fund "invented, literally out of the blue," huge unpaid government debts.

Those "gross irregularities," Which Budhoo claims were deliberate and not mere "sloppy calculations," were taken as fact by the financial markets, which promptly classified Trinidad as a bad risk and cut off its financing. The country's economic problems-triggered by a drop in the price of oil, its primary export-quickly became calamitous, and it was forced to beg the IMF for a bailout. The fund then demanded that it accept what Budhoo described as the IMF's "deadliest medicine": layoffs, wage cuts and the "whole gamut" of structural adjustment policies. He described the process as "deliberate blocking of an economic lifeline to the country through subterfuge" in order to see "Trinidad and Tobago destroyed economically first, and converted thereafter."

In his letter, Budhoo, who died in 2001, made it clear that his dispute was over more than the treatment of one country by a handful of officials. He characterized the IMF's entire program of structural adjustment as a form of mass torture in which "'screaming-in-pain governments and peoples are forced to bend on their knees before us, broken and terrified and disintegrating, and begging for a sliver of reasonableness and decency on our part. But we laugh cruelly in their face, and the torture goes on unabated."

After the letter was published, the government of Trinidad commissioned two independent studies to investigate the allegations and found that they were correct: the IMF had inflated and fabricated numbers, with tremendously damaging results for the country.

Even with this substantiation, however, Budhoo's explosive allegations disappeared virtually without a trace; Trinidad and Tobago is a collection of tiny islands off the coast of Venezuela, and unless its people storm the headquarters of the IMF on Nineteenth st, its complaints are unlikely to capture world attention. The letter was, however, turned into a play in 1996 called Mr. Budhoo's Letter of Resignation from the IMF (fifty years is enough), put on in a small theater in New York's East Village. The production received a surprisingly positive review in The New York Times, which praised its "uncommon creativity" and "inventive props." The short theater review was the only time Budhoo's name was ever mentioned in The New York Times.



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You know, it's just a matter of time before they do this to us. You see signs already, like Moody's threatening to cut our credit rating. The vampires want to privatize our country and if they have to LIE about our numbers, they will do that. Something to watch for as we go into a "recession" cause by the greedy banks. Maybe it's all on purpose. Get ready to cut the hands off of anybody who suggests "entitlement" cuts.