The IMF has admitted what everyone knew all along: that the austerity it imposed was the wrong prescription for Greece:
The International Monetary Fund admitted it had failed to realise the damage austerity would do to Greece as the Washington-based organisation catalogued mistakes made during the bailout of the stricken eurozone country.
In an assessment of the rescue conducted jointly with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European commission, the IMF said it had been forced to override its normal rules for providing financial assistance in order to put money into Greece.
Fund officials had severe doubts about whether Greece's debt would be sustainable even after the first bailout was provided in May 2010 and only agreed to the plan because of fears of contagion.
Which raises the obvious question: are they going to do anything to fix the mess they've made? Or are they going to ignore it and prescribe the same deadly medicine to the next country?
And it is deadly medicine. The IMF's austerity didn't just crash the Greek economy, sentence it to decades of poverty, and infect them with fascism and torture - it killed people, from poor health care, infant mortality, disease and suicide. If a doctor committed this sort of malpractice, they'd be going to jail. The IMF technocrats who did this to Greece should face the same fate.
