Argentina Tells IMF to F--K Off

Plaza De Mayo, Buenos Aires, December 19, 2001

In 2001 Argentina's economy plummeted due to a combination of foreign influence, IMF policies, and President Mennen's adoption of the Washington Consensus. Following that, Argentina suffered through a humbling period of bank runs and complete economic collapse leading to the threat of defaulting against international debts and verged on the edge of political collapse. Now its, 2007, and Argentina is back, better than ever, and with a vengeance.

During the last meeting of the IMF, Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner said to the IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato, "spend your time talking to others, because we’ve almost forgotten about you." And continued to say “the IMF no longer can indicate what we should do, we well know what happened when we did so”. Kirchner then boasted of Argentina's economy as having “one of the highest international reserves in history, 37.430 billion US dollars”.

To the embarrassment of the IMF, while almost every country under its advice languishes in poverty, after Argentina abandoned the IMF after its economic collapse and returned to manage its own monetary policy, Argentina now stands as perhaps the only developing nation who has paid back all of its IMF loans and did so in 2006.