These days $750 million can make a country one of the IMFs biggest borrowers? This clearly doesn’t resemble the late nineties or early naughties anymore. Yet another illustration of the Fund’s diminished role in the world today.

very funny

Cheney is in Azerbaijan to get him away from the Republican convention. They wanted to send him further, but the space station was already full.

There is some good betting that — like the late ’90s Balkans — the south Caucasus is on the verge of seeing an awful lot of aid money.

” Georgia is also expected to get a $750 million loan facility from the IMF, which if exercised would fairly quickly make it one of the Fund’s biggest borrowers.”

It’s obvious that the botched Georgian invasion of Ossetia was war gamed and accounted for. The financial fall-out will be considerable.

Despite the fact that Saakashvili likes to put NATO and EU flags on any rostrum from which he speaks, he isn’t a bona fide member of either. So it’s obvious he had assurances that he would bailed out from any backlash.

Another typical story from Reuters about the impact on Georgia’s fledgling tourist industry:

http://www.reuters.com/article/inDepthNews/idUSL311947020080903

As we know from Yeltsin’s Russia, IMF money never gets past a corrupt Government to ordinary people. It will be probably be diverted on arrival, if not before.