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Barack Obama said it's gonna be the worst recession since the Great Depression. I think it's gonna get pretty bad. I agree with budsbabes on the point that you would have to be a delusional idiot to think otherwise.
Onwebcam, do I win the prize?
For starters 48 per cent of voting power at the IMF is in the hands of eight executive directors representing their own countries (USA, Japan, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, China, and the Russian Federation) while the other 176 member-states have 16 representatives with virtually the same voting power. At the WB the same executive nations apart from China again hold nearly half (46 per cent) of voting power. In the WTO, although all 144 member nations theoretically have a say, actual decision-making occurs in the "green room" - the small group meetings convened by the director-general and heavily influenced by Canada, the European Union, Japan and the United States. None of the countries listed above is in the southern hemisphere, and none is a 'developing' (poorer) country.
Not one member of the boards of directors in the IMF is a woman, and 92 per cent of board members at the WB are male. By convention Europeans select the director of IMF and the US government selects the head of the WB. 'Other countries and critics rightly brand the process as undemocratic and insufficiently accountable', the United Nations Human Development Report 2002 [HDR] comments.
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