IMF responds to Nielsen accusations
Sir,
Thomas Dawson is the IMF spokesman. His letter is the institutional answer to my article. I find it misleading and regrettable.
It is misleading because although it is true that several papers from the Fund’s staff and even from the improperly denominated Independent Evaluation Office referred to the role played by the IMF in the Argentine crisis, these only cover events up to the first quarter of 2002 at the most. My article is the only one I know that covers Argentine events starting on May 1 2002 and going through to November 28 2005.
Regarding leakages and misconduct, there were many streaming from the IMF on different occasions. I will only point out two in addition to the one described in my article. Early on, we noticed that the monetary policy steps, which were discussed and agreed with the IMF, turned out to be ineffectual.
We soon found out that the agreed-upon monetary programme, which became the script of our monetary policy, had been carefully leaked to economic and financial consultants in Buenos Aires, which meant that all market participants were aware of it and could anticipate our monetary policy moves.