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The IMF wants retail gas prices to rise, because if you are poor you will save more

What is the strategy of the International Monetary Fund for dealing with the energy crisis? Funding developing countries to extract more natural gas and oil? Provide a series of strategic investments to reduce the impact of the energy crisis? No, none of these solutions.

The International Monetary Fund has urged European governments to pass on rising energy costs to consumers to encourage "energy savings" and a shift to greener diets, while protecting the poorest families. Here is an extract from the FT

European governments, which have sought to protect households from the spike in costs with price controls, tax cuts and subsidies, "should allow the entire increase in fuel costs to be passed on to end users to encourage energy savings and the abandonment of fossil fuels, ” said the deputy director of the European department of the IMF. Writing in an IMF blog post on Wednesday, Oya Celasun added that at the same time governments should put in place support measures for low-income households, who are less able to cope with soaring energy prices. , is "a priority".

Obviously Oya Celasun, who will receive a monthly dollar salary with four zeros, will certainly have no problem paying tripled gas bills, but the rest of the citizens, and not just the poorer classes, will. Families with seniors and children in the house cannot be expected to decide to keep the temperature in the house at 10 degrees to "save money", however they will keep decent temperatures, they will continue, a little less, to take a shower and try to keep it warm . The result of this policy will be an increase in bills, a plunge in disposable income and a vertical drop in consumption, which would translate into recession, depression and economic crisis.

Perhaps this is precisely what the IMF is aiming for: a nice cure of harsh austerity for everyone, including the industrial system. Forgetting, however, that the contraction of the Western production system will have epochal repercussions precisely on the West, which has the IMF as its own expression, condemning it to a secondary economic role in the world which, however, is already visible. With this absurd proposal, the IMF wants to accelerate the decline of the very countries that created it. After all, the absurdity of the idea is testified by the fact that Germany, a country that has not guessed an international economic policy in the last 2o years, has made it its own.


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The article The IMF wants retail gas prices to rise, because when you are poor you will save more comes from ScenariEconomici.it .


This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-fmi-vuole-laumento-dei-prezzi-del-gas-al-dettaglio-perche-da-poveri-risparmierete-di-piu/ on Thu, 04 Aug 2022 08:00:41 +0000.