prevent it from recurring. But this was a very subtle sleight of hand – a kind of ruse. The structural adjustment reforms themselves had nothing to do with the real causes of the crisis. The real causes of the crisis were exogenous: they had to do with exorbitant interest rates and declining terms of trade, over which global South countries had no control. But the IMF had no intention of tackling these problems, for to do so would require challenging the interests of Western governments and their commercial banks. Instead, the IMF acted as though the problem was endogenous, as though it had to
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