Around The World In A Few Weeks

There is a dearth of formalized material about the international monetary system relative to the Fed, U.S. fiscal policy, and many other macroeconomic features of the U.S. economy in standard macro and monetary textbooks, or so I've found.

So, I spent a lot of today looking for stuff that would help me better understand it all. I started my search with the IMF, because it seems very political and thus should put a human face on these concepts for me.

I found a book about World Bank and IMF aid to Pakistan. It's pretty decent, even though it relies exclusively on econometrics and empirical analysis. I read a bit of it today, and have established that as far as Pakistan goes, between 1972 and 1999, IMF aid is negatively related to gross output. Imagine that!

I found a 33 minute video with Paul Krugman and some other important guys. It was not helpful at all; it was more of an emotional appeal about the conditionalities of IMF loans, if you could even call it that, than an educational video about the causal mechanisms of the IMF. I saw one on Jamaica a year ago, before I cared about this stuff, and it played the same guitar string. This reaffirms my suspicion that the IMF is very politicized, at least externally, and like so many other issues plaguing economic debates, true knowledge of the subject is possessed by few.

Tonight I went to Wikipedia to learn about IMF SDRs, and then to CATO to learn why SDRs will likely never become an international currency.

All in all, a productive day. I'm going to dabble on the IMF for another week, then onto the World Bank, and then so on.