Are US oligarchs the block to recovery?

Are American oligarchs the block on economic recovery?

The accusation against the International Monetary Fund has often been that it is dominated by the United States and that its prescriptions for ailing economies involved painful medicine that America has been loathe to take itself.

After all, when the IMF helped the Ukraine face hyper-inflation in 1994, Russia cope with debt in 1998, or when the Indonesian rupiah plunged in 1997 the recommendations were austere.

Vested interests

Sorting out economies is painful, partly because powerful people round the government have a vested interest.

So what would the IMF tell the United States now?

Simon Johnson is a professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and he moves between that and the IMF where he's been an economic advisor and, until recently, the Director of the Research Department.

He points a finger at what he calls American oligarchs.