The Evil Empire Jude Wanniski January 2, 1997

Memo To: Jacob M. Schlesinger
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Your IMF Story, WSJ

Should American taxpayers ante up another zillion dollars for the International Monetary Fund to help it bail out the next Mexico? Your answer seems to be an emphatic yes, based on your exhaustive reporting on the matter,  (12/31/96 WSJ, p. 4,  “IMF Drafts Plan to Avert Another Mexico”). I note you quote only three sources: Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, IMF Chief Economist Stanley Fischer, and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs. If your exhaustive reporting had led you to dig even a fraction of an inch below the surface, Mr. Schlesinger, you would have found that these three chalk-stained, Ivy League professors have been working as a team for the last several years, doing their best to destroy economic growth whenever it rears its ugly head. Two have incredibly powerful public positions for which they are totally unfit, having lived their entire lives on academic or government payrolls. The third, Mr. Sachs, is a close buddy, whose job it is to stand outside the IMF and accuse it of being mediocre, at times incompetent, because it does not have enough U.S. taxpayer funds to hire more of his friends. “Give my pals Larry Summers and Stan Fischer another $30 billion or so, and they will show you a thing or two,” he has come close to saying on many occasions. The “shock therapy” that was designed by Jeffrey Sachs for Moscow’s conversion to capitalism was fully backed by Fischer and Summers, who at the time was chief economist of the World Bank.

If you would leaf back into the files of Dow Jones, you will find the fingerprints of Stan Fischer and Larry Summers on the Mexican peso debacle. These were the whizkids north of the border who engineered the peso devaluation, as soon as it was possible following the departure of Finance Minister Pedro Aspe, who had fought this evil crowd almost every day of his six years at  Hacienda. The IMF would not have needed a nickel to mop up the giant mess these evil nitwits caused, for fun and profit, thinking they could get away with an itsy-bitsy devaluation which instead turned into a crash. The IMF/World Bank represents an Evil Empire, which does the bidding of the international bankers who earn interesting pocket money by having the inside scoop on every IMF-induced devaluation on earth. Haven’t you heard?

For your Rolodex, Mr. Schlesinger, I will list for you the Ten Most Evil Men in the World. This is based on our scholarly analysis and exhaustive reporting on the ten whose public works or private agitations have caused more people to have suffered needlessly in recent years than any others. In order of evil:

1) Michel Camdessus, executive director of the IMF, Darth Vader himself.

2) Stanley Fischer, chief economist of the IMF, formerly professor at MIT.

3) Rudiger Dornbusch, professor of economics, MIT, who constantly roams the world urging unsuspecting governments to devalue their currencies and raise taxes.

4) Jeffrey Sachs, Harvard economist and henchman who espoused burning down entire economies that don’t work in the belief that good ones will soon emerge, “shock therapy.”

5) Lawrence Summers, Deputy Treasury Secretary.

6) Paul Krugman, MIT economist now at Stanford, chief economist of the Microsoft Slate, who roams the world warning unsuspecting governments of emerging markets to discourage foreign equity investments, or else what happened to Mexico will happen to them.

7) Fred Bergsten, director, Institute for International Economics, Wash. DC. Bergsten holds the world’s record for talking governments into devaluing their currencies for fun and profit, including the United States in 1971. The term manic devaluationist was coined especially to fit Fred. A charter member of the Evil Empire.

8) Jacques DeLors, director of the European Community Commission, the evil twin brother of Michel Camdessus, separated at birth, whose life goal is to hammer everyone on earth down to the lowest common denominator.

9) James Tobin, professor of economics, Yale University, the grand daddy of the devaluationists, whose work spawned an entire generation of neo-Keynesian globetrotters. Evil Emeritus.

10) Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq.

By the way, Saddam Hussein barely made the evil list. We’re more sure of the first nine, even though their intentions may have been motivated less by evil than his. We tend to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt more than we do Michel Camdessus. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, by professionals who think they know everything and thus can avoid dealing with their critics. This goes for journalists as well as Bigdome Macroeconomists.

Otherwise, Happy New Year.