Linda Kinstler, Quartz: Ukraine is heading for a total economic collapse
When IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde announced Ukraine’s new, $17.5 billion bailout package Thursday morning, she suggested it would be a “turning point for Ukraine,” which stands to receive $40 billion in relief funding from various sources over the next four years. “This new four-year arrangement would support immediate economic stabilization in Ukraine as well as a set of bold policy reforms aimed at restoring robust growth over the medium term and improving living standards for the Ukrainian people,” Lagarde said from Brussels.
But it will take a lot more than IMF billions to dig Ukraine out of economic crisis, and to implement the reforms Lagarde’s IMF team has demanded. In order to survive, Ukraine will need to fashion a new social contract with its citizens, one that sheds hundreds of social services left over from the Soviet era, which Ukraine’s nomenkatlura, its upper-middle class civil servants, still enjoy.
Update: Ukraine to get $40-billion in funding, IMF chief says -- Reuters
WNU Editor: Ukraine is not heading for a total economic collapse ... it is already there. And even though this IMF loan is a lot of money .... it is still a loan that needs to be paid back one day, and (this is the sad part) it is a drop in the bucket for what Ukraine really needs.
5 comments:
But it will allow the Ukraine to keep fighting the war.
I just mentioned it in the other post's comment thread .... but yes .... that money is going to go into the war machine.
Weapons are a great thing to have in a war.. as long as you have people with guts enough to use them when things get hot and those rebels can make things hot
Funny thing, is it's not a "war".
The IMF/World Bank, can't loan money to a country at "war".
WNU,
If this wasn't so sad for the regular people there, I would laugh till the cows came home. Jay's probably right about the US assuring the money behind the scenes to keep Kiev fighting and of course your thoughts as to what will happen with this money. What people need to understand and use as a basis to grasp what's happening is that all of this is really about the EU and the US not the Ukraine. Self deception is the rule in the West (see "surprised" in Yemen). Putin knows this and it forms the basis of his policy. The West will do everything in it's power to "save" the Ukraine, except help it, and perhaps in a realistic sense it can't be helped given the current social/political structure. As I have said ad nausea the Kievian side is headed for complete collapse, but this does not mean Eastern Ukraine doesn't have similar problems that they'll eventually have to confront.
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