PRESS RELEASE
Even in Bleak Annual Survey,
IMF Doctored the Data
April 21, 2012 (EIRNS)—A senior finance ministry official attending the ongoing International Monetary Fund-World Bank annual Spring meeting in Washington has reported that the IMF's annual survey, which warned of a four trillion euro hole in the European banking system, was rewritten to vastly understate the actual magnitude of the blowout. An earlier draft report, seen by the source, painted a much worse picture of the non-performing debt on the books of the big European banks. The actual IMF estimate is that at least €7 trillion be needed to bail out the private European banks this year.
The same source reported that a report by the IMF's Internal Audit Office revealed that the IMF was totally unprepared to deal with the 2008 crisis, nominally triggered by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. However, crucial segments of the report dealing with the United States and the United Kingdom were either ignored and/or rewritten. The U.S. government, according to the source, simply ignored the assessment and recommendations of the IMF. The British government, headed at the time of the report's drafting by Gordon Brown, responded even more insanely. The source indicated that Gordon Brown personally intervened and rewrote the report—sentence by sentence—to cover up the magnitude of the failures.
Senior U.S. intelligence sources had reported earlier this year, at the time of the initiating of the ECB's bailout discount window, that the European banks would need an estimated €6 trillion to avert a total meltdown this year. The IMF source subsequently confirmed that number, adding that the IMF estimates were that a minimum of €7-8 trillion would be needed. In light of those figures, the announcement today that the IMF bailout fund was being expanded by $430 billion (and that, pending approval by the pledging governments by the time of the next G-20 summit in June) is not even a drop in the bucket.
