Reply #23: The IMF has said that Zimbabwe needs to close half their national banks. [View All]

[AP]

I believe there used to be only 4 national banks in Zimbabwe which dominated the entire economy. They were all foreign-owned. Zimbabwe took steps to open 8 more which were Black-Zimbabwean owned and which were primarily interested in developing the Zimbabwean economy for Zimbabwe.

One or two of those banks have closed due to financial problems which shouldn't be any surprise -- they practically opened overnight. Obviously that's no condemnation of the economic logic of having these local banks involved in the economy, at the very least, providing competition to banks whose loyalties lie elsewhwere, and at best, turing the banking sector entirely into something which works for Zimbabwe first.

However, the IMF is using the (again, predictabe) financial problems as evidence that Zimbabw needs to close all but 6 of the banks. Do you think of the banks they think should close are headquartered anywhere other than in Zimbabwe? I doubt it.

The representation of Zimbabwe in the press, and the treatment by foreign governments is 99.9% about which direction Zimbabwe's wealth is going to flow, inwards or towards Europe and it's .1% about what Mugabe is all about.

For comparison, the guy the US supports in VZ -- Carlos Ortega -- was taped saying that he believes that VZ needs 10-12 years of a dictatorship to get back on track. That's the guy we're supporting on the grounds that Chavez is antidemocratic! America doesn't care about democracy and human rights. It cares about the direction the wealth flows.