The IMF is too restricted both in its ability to operate and in its ability to conceptualise and to innovate. It is too stale: a scroll in the age of the video clip. It, therefore, resorts to prescribing the same medicine of austerity to all the country patients, which are suffering from a myriad of economic diseases. No one would call a doctor who uniformly administers penicillin - a good doctor and, yet, this, exactly is what the IMF is doing. 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 (to use a gross understatement - the daily turnover in the foreign exchange markets alone is 6 times the total equity of this organization). The result is fiascos like South Korea where a 60 billion USD aid package was consumed in days without providing any discernible betterment of the economic situation. More and more, the IMF looks anachronistic (not to say archaic) and its goals untenable. The IMF also displays the whole gamut of problems which plague every bureaucratic institution: discrimination (why help Mexico and not Bulgaria - is it because it shares no border with the USA), politicisation (South Korean officials complained that the IMF officials were trying to smuggle trade concessions to the USA in an otherwise totally financial package of measures) and too much red tape. But this was to be expected of an organization this size and with so much power. The medicine is no better than the doctor or, for that matter, than the disease that it is intended to cure. The IMF forces governments to restrict flows of capital and goods. Reducing budget deficits belongs to the former - reducing balance of payments deficits, to the latter. Consequently, government find themselves between the hard rock of not complying with the IMF performance demands (and criteria) - and the hammer of needing its assistance more and more often, getting hooked on it. The crusader-economist Michel Chossudowski wrote once that the IMF's adjustment policies "trigger the destruction of whole economies". With all due respect (Chossudowski conducted research in 100 countries regarding this issue), this looks a trifle overblown. Overall, the IMF has beneficial accounts, which cannot be discounted so off-handedly. But the process that he describes is, to some extent, true: