Glazyev: NDB Won’t Compete with IMF/ADB, Since They Gave Up on Development!

Sergey Glazyev, Russian Presidential Adviser for Regional Economic Integration, addressing the VII BRICS Academic Forum in Moscow Friday, ironically argued that the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) is not an alternative, but a complement, to the IMF/World Bank institutions. As RIA Novosti put it: “It will address the challenges that Western institutions currently ignore. The purpose of the BRICS development institution is to help develop its member countries, while Washington-led financial institutions, the IMF and the World Bank are no longer doing this, the Russian President’s advisor said.”

The IMF, Glazyev said, represents financial speculators, imposing conditionalities with its loans which force the dismantling of barriers for the movement of speculative capital. “The volume of speculative capital has more than tripled over the last five years due to the increase of volume emissions of global currencies, but that printing press of the dollar, euro, pound, and yen reaches the BRICS countries only in the form of speculative waves,” said Glazyev, destabilizing rather than sustaining the economy.

The world is undergoing a “deep structural crisis which is financial, economic, and technological at once,” he said, so that the BRICS countries need cooperative financial institutions to implement long-term development programs. “Neither the IMF nor the World Bank are doing this today, but for us such financial institutions are extremely important, as we live in a common economic space, which should combine their competitive advantage.”

The VII BRICS Academic Forum is one of a series of meetings being hosted by Russia in the run-up to the July BRICS and SCO summits in Ufa, meetings which have served as an essential venue for generating ideas. The two-day meeting that opened today was addressed by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, and is slated to include panels on the global financial architecture and on investment priorities worldwide, chaired by Chinese specialists.