



As Yanis Varoufakis describes in his book Adults in the Room





Less than a month after my election, on 11 February 2015, in one of those spirit-numbing, windowless, neon-lit meeting rooms that litter the EU’s Brussels buildings, I found myself sitting opposite Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, France’s ex-finance minister and a former Washington-based high-flying lawyer. She had waltzed into the building earlier that day a glamorous leather jacket, making me look drab and conventionally attired. This being our first encounter, we chatted amicably in the corridor before moving into the meeting room for the serious discussion.





Behind closed doors, with a couple of aides on each side, the conversation turned serious but remained just as friendly. She afforded me the opportunity to present my basic analysis of the causes and nature of the Greek situation as well as my proposals for dealing with it, and nodded in agreement for much of the time. We seemed to share a common language and were both keen to establish a good rapport. At the meeting's end, walking towards the door, we got a chance for a short, relaxed but telling tete-a-tete.





Taking her cue from the points I had made, Christine seconded my appeals for debt relief and lower tax rates as prerequisites for a Greek recovery. Then she addressed me with calm and gentle honesty: You are of course right, Yanis. These targets that they insist on can't work. But, you must understand that we have put too much into this programme. We cannot go back on it. Your credibility depends on accepting and working within this programme.





So, there I had it. The head of the IMF was telling the finance minister of a bankrupt government that the policies imposed upon his country couldn't work. Not that it would be hard to make them work. Not that the probability of them working was low. No, she was acknowledging that, come hell or high water, they couldn't work.









Recall that i n a released archive of 13 million pages by CIA, we found quite an impressive report concerning the IMF changing strategies on debtor countries. The report dates back to 1985, but what is even more impressive, is that, it was predicting an increase of instability in those countries, as well as, methods of reducing potential popular anger! Specifically, the report was monitoring IMF's changing policy to enforce strict conditions and austerity on indebted countries that could cause political unrest.





Concerning the policies imposed by the IMF, the report clearly refers to the complete control of money flow through the central bank:





Standby arrangements almost always include performance criteria expressed in terms of quantitative targets, which usually are reviewed on a quarterly basis. The criteria normally take three general forms: A ceiling on central bank lending and the subceiling on lending to the central government [...] Limits on the assets of the central bank, which are designed to limit the expansion of money supply ...



