Can Bitcoin Fix the IMF & World Bank with Alex Gladstein & Natalie Smolenski - WBD674

Alex Gladstein is Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights
Foundation & Natalie Smolenski is an Executive Director of
the Texas Bitcoin Foundation. In this interview, we discuss
Alex’s new book: ‘Hidden Repression: How the IMF and World Bank
Sell Exploitation as Development’. We talk about debt traps,
western support for dictators, US and UK culpability, and what
freedom means.


- - - -


The IMF and World Bank were originally created to stabilize
exchange rates and fund infrastructure in war-torn countries.
Alex Gladstein’s work found that there was a pivot in this
mission in the late 1960s. The new mission was to target and
exploit poor countries for the benefit of the West,
neocolonialism replacing colonialism, debt replacing the sword.


These institutions have been incredibly harmful to poor
countries, but also incredibly beneficial for the West through
interest payments, extraction of resources and labour, and
control of markets. This has been done with only a limited need
for military intervention and subjugation through physical means.
The wheels of this process have been oiled by the co-option of
dictactors in on the steal.


Bitcoin is a way out and may bring some justice. However, there
must also be a reckoning with the damage done to poor countries
by these exploitative policies. The IMF and World Bank have
repeatedly prevented free markets from working normally in such
countries forcing them deeper into debt. And when the country has
inevitably defaulted, damaging structural adjustments have been
imposed limiting government expenditure and hurting the most
vulnerable.


As Alex Gladstein asserts, changing the monetary paradigm, with
the growth of Bitcoin, could break the current system and give
hope for a more sustainable future. But in that process, we have
to be clear about what we need to repair. As Natalie Smolenski
states, without a programme of debt cancellation then we could
enter a period of significant geopolitical stress.