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55 new news items in the last 24 hours
23 July 08:36

Communist Heaven on Capitalist Debt

Remus Ștefureac
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Very good friends, as well as non-friends, always tell me about the Ceaușescu regime in the 1970s, described as a kind of heaven on earth, the benchmark by which the communist regime should be judged in terms of living standards.
From what I've read, from what I've heard, certainly, in the `70s one lived much better than in the `60s and infinitely better than in the `80s when an entire nation (with small nomenklaturist exceptions) was forced to starve in the dark and cold.
What is not said is that the Communist Heaven on Earth of the `70s was born on.... debt. With Romanians' labor, but with capitalists' money. More precisely, with massive loans from the West, from capitalists, from the IMF, the World Bank. Yes yes, you heard right.... A large part of the communist industry (insufficiently adapted to the commercial needs and technological rigors of the time) could only be built up with capitalist loans from the global occult headed by the IMF. As a result, in the 1970's, Romania's foreign debt increased some 20 times. What followed afterwards, i.e. the famine of the 1980s to pay off the bill, seems unfortunately not to be remembered by too many Romanians. Some similarities with more contemporary situations are purely coincidental...
For the sake of conformity, I leave below a quote from an interview given in March 2013 to Gândul newspaper by Florea Dumitreescu, former Finance Minister of communist Romania in the 1970s and former governor of the NBR in the 1980s.
Florea Dumitrescu was the first finance minister from a socialist country that was a member of the EAC to sign agreements with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
And now the quote from Gândul, from the article published on March 9, 2013.
"With timid steps, the authorities in Bucharest began to gather information from the press and through embassies about the way the two institutions (i.e. the IMF and the World Bank) worked, the technical aspects of a potential collaboration being little known at the time. Although the briefings were carried out under an "embargo of secrecy", Dumitrescu believes that the Moscow authorities began to suspect Romania's intentions, especially because "their spying was doing its job", the former official says. After intense negotiations that lasted more than two years and in the context of Moscow's hostile stance, which was also highlighted by the frequent criticism of lower-ranking Soviet officials visiting Romania, on August 20, 1975 Romania sent the IMF its first letter of intent to reach an agreement with the Fund. The document stressed that Romania was on an ongoing program to promote rapid economic growth so that the living standards of its population would approach those of the more highly industrialized countries (...).
In 1972, when Romania took the decision to become a member of the IMF and the World Bank, the Minister of Finance attended, as was customary at the time, a meeting of the CAER's financial committee, determined and mandated to announce Romania's plan to his counterparts in the socialist bloc. (...)
He was then approached by two colleagues who also wanted to know what Romania's approaches were regarding its relations with the Fund. "Don't make a schedule, we'll meet in the afternoon. Florea, tell me what you did, the first steps, how you dared to do this. Sir, says (the Polish minister), you have taken a big step. We need it too," recalls Dumitrescu. On December 15, 1972, Romania became a member of the IMF, paying its quota in gold. "I think about 40-42 tons was our quota. On average, Romania had around 100 tons of gold in reserve at all times, more or less, from domestic production, from purchases on the market, but mostly from domestic production that had accumulated," the former finance minister said."

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