I read this post from Mish. The Telegraph is reporting IMF may need to “print money” as crisis spreads:

The International Monetary Fund may soon lack the money to bail out an ever growing list of countries crumbling across Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, raising concerns that it will have to tap taxpayers in Western countries for a capital infusion or resort to the nuclear option of printing its own money.

WTF? Seriously? I don’t even know how to approach this from a macro perspective. It sounds to me like throwing good money after bad. It sounds almost identical to the desperate lending to Argentina before they defaulted. It sounds batshit crazy. The article has this gem:

The root problem is that Eastern Europe and Russia have together borrowed $1,600bn from foreign banks in euros and dollars to fund their catch-up growth spurt over the last five years, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements. These loans are now coming due at an alarming pace. Even rock-solid companies are having trouble rolling over debts.

My definition of “rock solid” apparently differs from that used by the author of the article. But wait! It only gets better.

Pakistan - now facing imminent bankruptcy - has also raised political hackles, balking at IMF demands for deep cuts in military spending as a condition for a standby loan. Diplomats say it is unlikely that the West will let the nuclear-armed Islamic state slip into chaos.

Note to everyone: Money is fungible. The money you lend someone to buy bricks is indistinguishable from the money they spent to buy bombs. If you and I each give a hobo $10, and he buys a burger and a bottle of hooch, you can’t rationally say that the burger was from your gift and the hooch was from mine and then claim the moral high ground. Instead of forcing Pakistan to choose between economic and military investment, the IMF enabled both. Now they’re being blackmailed into continued support.