 There could be a recession next year in 2023. That's the latest warning from the IMF. And the IMF has also given a set of prescriptions to countries on what to do to get out of a possible recession. Well, the problem with the IMF's prescriptions are that the cure is usually worse than the disease. If countries, especially the developing and poor countries, follow what the IMF wants them to, then they're likely to go into a deep economic slowdown which will cost millions and millions of jobs and might even push many people below the poverty line. The only gainers will be finance capital and the global rich because that is who the IMF bats for. That is why if there is a recession next year, it is the IMF which will be to blame. In short, the worst is yet to come and for many people 2023 will feel like a recession. By the middle of 1944, the guns of World War II were trained on Germany. Hitler's forces lay maimed and defeated, beaten back from the east by the Soviet Red Army and from the west by the Allied forces. Soon Paris would fall to the Allies. Paris is liberated. No wonder these French folks have gone wild with joy. But England too had been bombed out of several decades of progress. Churchill knew victory over Germany was only half the battle. England would need loads of money to rebuild itself, especially because India, the jewel in the crown, was soon to be lost by the British Empire. On the other side, in the USA, President Roosevelt's new deal was turning America into the new industrial and commercial powerhouse. England was getting into a new world order where it would have to place second fiddle to the two emerging powers. The US and the Soviet Union. That is why the British and the Americans came together in 1944 to come up with a new financial body which would safeguard their international commercial and economic interests. And from this was born the International Monetary Fund or the IMF. At Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, delegates from 44 Allied and Associate Countries arrived for the opening of the United Nations Monetary and Financial. The blueprint of the IMF was set out at this meeting of all Allied nations in Bretton Woods, but it was dominated by delegations from the US and Britain. The task of pushing England's interests fell on the influential economist John Maynard Keynes while the US was represented by Harry Dexter White. It was White who would ultimately prevail in setting the tone of the IMF's core principles, the promotion of the American economic vision across the world. Now the IMF was supposedly set up to help nations come out of the devastations of World War II and to help poor countries develop faster, especially the colonies which had faced drain of wealth under colonialism. But what ultimately happened was the IMF effectively pushed colonialism without colonies by pushing free international trade and by trying to make the American dollar effectively the global reserve currency. This would get accelerated from the 1980s under Ronald Reagan's presidency, which brought about a radical change in America's own economic vision. Factory flows would give way to Wall Street to a handful of investors, brokers and bankers. And that had a profound effect on inequality in America. Roosevelt's new deal increased the income share of the bottom half of Americans and reduced that of the richest 1%. Reaganomics reversed that from the 1980s, dramatically increasing the income share of the richest 1% and reducing that of the poorest 50%. It would show up in popular cinema of 80s. Now what caused this massive rise in inequality in the USA? There were four key things. Lower taxes on the rich, reduction of welfare spending by the government, deregulation of businesses, especially finance and using interest rate as a weapon to keep inflation low, even if it caused high levels of unemployment. The IMF exported this neoliberal economic formula to every country it gave a loan to, causing them to lose all sovereignty over the economic policies, pushing them deeper into debt and converting them into raw material suppliers to the developed world. Joseph Stieglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist, detailed the disastrous impact of IMF imposed policies on countries in Asia, Latin America and in sub-Saharan Africa in his book Globalization and its Discontents. But despite years of criticism from some of the most credible economists in the world, the IMF continues to push its neoliberal, neo-imperialist economic policies. And even now the alarm bells it's ringing about a possible recession next year is essentially aimed at making nations fall in line, go back to stricter neoliberal economic policies which they're somewhat jettisoned during COVID by increasing welfare, by increasing government spending. And the IMF's alarm bells essentially boil down to one thing, inflation, inflation, inflation. The IMF says increasing price pressures remain the most immediate threat to current and future prosperity. And what is the IMF's prescription on how to control inflation? It is to increase interest rates and tighten monetary policy. In fact, the IMF says that it is better for central banks to over-tighten than under-tighten, even if it means that some countries might fall into recession. And it says that even if some countries begin to slow down because of higher interest rates, central banks around the world need to keep a steady hand with monetary policy firmly focused on taming inflation. That means the IMF would rather have recession than allow inflation to continue even though recession hits the poorest countries the most and even within that it hits the poor the most, causing massive job losses, causing standards of living to fall and also pushing many people below the poverty line and the brink of starvation. The question is why? The answer is that the IMF bats for the western powers which control it and the western powers are controlled by finance capital. Finance capital hates inflation because inflation eats into the returns that they get from financial assets. Of course, inflation could also be tamed by governments through price controls, through rationing, through curbs on exports, but finance capital does not want that because that would give unnecessary authority to the government and questions would be raised that if the government has to bail out capitalism then why allow capital to have a free reign? That is why the IMF in its report says, price controls, untargeted subsidies or export bans are fiscally costly and lead to excess demand under supply, misallocation, rationing and black market premiums. In fact, the IMF wants governments to cut back on subsidies, reduce pending to become fiscally prudent and only give targeted subsidies where it is absolutely necessary. Otherwise it says it would act at cross purposes with central banks and inflation would not be tamed. That shows that the IMF's concern about recession and its recession warnings are pure humbug, they're just hypocrisy because the policies it advocates will only cause recession, not stop it. That's the show today, keep watching NewsClick, subscribe to our channel, like this video, comment and share it as well.