The IMF is too restricted in both its ability to operate and in its ability to conceptualise and to innovate. It, therefore, resorts to prescribing the same medicine of austerity to all the sovereign patients, which are suffering from a myriad of economic diseases. And it is doing so with utter disregard and ignorance of the local social, cultural (even economic) realities. Add to this the fact that the IMF's ability to influence the financial markets in an age of globalisation is dubious (the daily turnover in the foreign exchange markets alone is 6 times the total resources of the IMF). The result is fiascos like South Korea and Indonesia where 40-60 billion USD aid packages was consumed by sick economies in days to no avail. More and more, the IMF looks anachronistic and its goals untenable. The IMF also displays the whole gamut of problems which plague every bureaucratic institution: discrimination (why help Mexico, which shares a border with the USA and not Bulgaria, which doesn't?), politicisation (South Korean and Indonesian officials complained that the IMF officials tried to surreptitiously introduce trade concessions to the USA into an otherwise financial package of measures) and too much red tape. The problem is that the IMF forces governments to restrict flows of capital and goods, and to reduce budget and balance of payments deficits. Consequently, governments find themselves caught between non-compliance with the IMF performance criteria - and addiction to its assistance. The crusader-economist Michel Chossudowski wrote once that the IMF's adjustment policies "trigger the destruction of whole economies". This looks a trifle overblown. But the process that he describes is, to some extent, true and fully applicable to Russia.