Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and Wto

Geography professor Peet explores the institutional histories of the three pillars of the global financial order, from their circumscribed beginnings at the post-war Bretton Woods Conference to their increasingly central role in many Third World economies in this detailed critique. As the IMF and World Bank condition their loans on far-reaching and draconian""structural adjustment"" programs, and the WTO acts as an unelected, super-government passing judgment on environmental regulations, labor standards and other supposed impediments to trade, Peet argues, these undemocratic organizations assert unprecedented levels of control over a wider and wider segment of the world's population. While maintaining a Keynesian regulatory role over the world economy, he contends, these institutions have become standard-bearers for the neoliberal ideology favored by the""Washington-Wall Street Alliance,"" imposing on poor countries a regimen of free trade, government austerity, export-led development and deregulation and privatization of the economy. Such policies, he says, although convenient for international corporations and investors, have been disastrous for the people of these countries, resulting in slow growth, environmental devastation, and rising poverty and inequality. Peet is an impassioned left-wing opponent of these policies, but his thoroughly researched and analytically incisive treatment ably sums up a critique that is growing in influence among activists and mainstream economists alike. Academically sophisticated but accessible to laypeople (although his discussion of neoliberal rhetoric occasionally lapses into wholly unnecessary Foucauldian jargon about""restrictive discursive spaces""), Peet's account provides real intellectual heft to back up the placards of anti-globalization protestors.