He devoted the last part of his talk to structural difficulties within the World Bank and IMF, which see to lie in their undemocratic unaccountability, which can be traced to their origin at Bretton Woods in 1944. Here, it seems J.M. Keynes, leading the British delegation, lost out to that of the United States, or more particularly, the US Treasury.

Some of Prof Stiglitz� listeners, like some readers, will have seen behind the US Treasury the influence of unelected finance corporations, who may well believe that what is working very well, does not need fixing. Over all, the event left behind a picture of a world in slavery, and the rather sombre conclusion, that banks are better than tanks at keeping the peasantry in its place.

Kevin Donnelly for CCMJ* May 2 2001

Further comment from an American colleague:

Stiglitz is the same as McNamara who after managing to produce the worst cars in history for Ford with the highest profit margin, with his systems approach to management, went on to re-organize the Defense Department for Kennedy to introduce mission oriented force deployment, with such concepts as �kill ratio� which totally distorted sensible measurement of the prospect of success in the Vietnam War, by measuring the number of Viet Cong dead rather than Vietnam�s national will, then went on to the World Bank to do more benign damage to the Third World. In his later years, he had the nerve to give speeches on TV about his mistakes in the Vietnam War.

Stiglitz was the World Bank His very belated criticism of WB policy is neither pertinent nor credible. He had hoped to be the WB�s president. The WB�s problem is not economic but political. It was essentially an instrument of the Cold War.

*CCMJ�Christian Council for Monetary Justice (UK)

DEBT

THE World Bank and IMF plan to turn the debt Jubilee on its head, bailing out global banks at taxpayer expense while claiming to help the world's poorest countries.

But debt laden countries will still have to pay all their available income as debt service. Not a penny will be freed for their own discretionary use, argues MICHAEL HUDSON.

Lost is an understanding of what Clean Slate and Jubilee proclamations were all about.

ADVOCATES of debt relief for impoverished countries made what they hoped would be a breakthrough when the World Bank and IMF agreed to join the world's richest central banks and sell gold and use the capital gains to finance a debt relief fund for the 1996 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC). But this plan and its successor, the Cologne Debt Relief Initiative, is just another bailout for the international banks and bondholders.

Indebted Third World countries were excluded from the planning of this initiative, as were the seemingly relevant UN organisations. The only outside parties consulted were the world's largest institutional creditors. Only at the end of the process were such groups as Jubilee 2000 and Oxfam brought on board to provide rhetorical window dressing to confuse the issue of just who is being helped.

What has gone unnoticed is that the debt service actually to be paid by the most heavily indebted countries will not be reduced by even a dollar. These hapless economies will have to turn over nearly all their income above subsistence levels to private sector creditors, even at the cost of selling their mineral resources, land and other publicly owned assets to foreign investors. The proceeds will be used to pay the banks and bondholders.

What, then, is being relinquished? Only debt claims that are so far beyond the ability of such countries to pay in the next few generations as to be effectively uncollectable.

The World Bank/IMF ploy (joined by the British Treasury and a few other central banks in nations whose financial interests wield considerable political power) is hardly a surprise. These two institutions have not helped make debtor countries more self-reliant. They are in the dependency business.

What makes the World Bank/IMF program a travesty is the attempt to relate it to the biblical Jubilee. The intent is to attract Christians and Jews to the biblical law of Leviticus 25. But the program has little in common with the biblical Jubilee.

CLEAN SLATES were practised in the ancient Near East for over 2,000 years, going back at least to 2,400 BC in Sumer. The Jewish Jubilee Year reflected its Babylonian antecedents in having three major features: