IMF-Off

A group of 30 Cambridge students and residents gate-crashed the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s conference in King’s College yesterday.

The group unfurled a banner from a balcony within the Conference Hall, reading “IMF is part of the problem, not the solution”.

Others disrupted the conference floor during a speech by Dominique Strauss Kahn, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and the man expected to be the French Socialist Party’s primary for the 2012 Presidential elections, to show anger at the IMF.

The conference aimed to “explore the reasons why prevailing economic theory failed to predict the financial and economic crisis”.

However protester Adam Reilly told The Tab “The IMF created the crisis; we don’t want their top-down solutions.

“The IMF increase inequality, privatise welfare and try to ‘open up’ markets for the benefit of western bankers and industry.”

One of the protest’s organisers, Shelly Hunt, said “We still live in a world divided along class lines. This conference only represents one side of those dividing lines”.

Struass Kahn, known as the “grand seducteur” after his affair with a colleague in 2008, “didn’t break his stride” and remained “cool under fire” during the protest acorrding to one witness, Steve Clemons.

Leaflets were distributed to the public as the protest continued outside the college after protesters were removed from the building by security. The police were called but let the protestors go after a “short chat”.

One protestor may be pressing charges against security guards for alleged manhandling and violence.

Guests at the Conference included three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics (Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof and James Mirrlees), George Soros and the chair of the FSA, Adam Turner.