Ha-Joon Chang on International Monetary Fund

“Being told by the IMF to go easy on austerity is like being told by the Spanish Inquisition to be more tolerant of heretics.”

“Throughout the 1980s and 90s, when many developing countries were in crisis and borrowing money from the International Monetary Fund, waves of protests in those countries became known as the "IMF riots". They were so called because they were sparked by the fund's structural adjustment programmes, which imposed austerity, privatisation and deregulation.”