The IMF rejected allegations made by a Czech central banker that it accelerated the impact of the financial crisis to cause the bailout of Central and Eastern Europe. Czech central bank Vice Governor Mojmir Hampl said the IMF’s actions were “obviously a systematic attempt to cause the bailout of the entire region,” according to an interview with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, which was posted on the bank’s Web site on April 2, Bloomberg reports. The remarks suggesting that the IMF “somehow intensified” the crisis “in the service of its own pecuniary interests - are at variance with the facts, while defying both common sense and the judgment of the international community,” Gerry Rice, the Deputy Director at IMF’s External Relations Department, said in a letter to Der Standard in response to the interview. “On the contrary, the IMF helped to stem the crisis, and then reverse it, by moving rapidly and decisively,” he said. The IMF provided billions of dollars in financial aid to countries like Hungary, Latvia, and Romania whose economies crumbled and capital markets froze because the financial crisis. The countries had to adopt austerity measures to comply with IMF loan programs as recessions boosted unemployment, sapped tax revenue and drove up welfare spending.
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