This work shows how the world's leading financial institutions - the IMF, World Bank and WTO - have been hijacked by the economic ideology of neoliberalism and the interest behind it, particularly from the 1980s onwards and in relation to their global financial, developmental and trade management roles. Instead of their original clearly defined, circumscribed and even benign responsibilities, they have now become the financial policemen of a global economy characterized by mounting extremes of rich and poor, recurrent instability, and failure over a half century to solve the problems of the developing countries. The story of the mounting opposition to these institutions is told. And the book concludes with a trenchant review of the various ideas now being canvassed not simply for their radical reform, but for alternative principles that might guide a very different form of globalization. INDICE Globalism and neoliberalism - from liberalism to Keynesianism - neoliberalism, hegemony and policy discourse, counter-hegemony, the rest of the book Bretton Woods - emergence of a global economic regime - political- economic context, discourses of economy, the US - from isolation to global hegemony, the conference, ratification, formalizing dominance the international monetary fund - structure of the IMF, crisis and transition, 1971-79, the debt crisis of the 1980s, capital account liberalization, new debt crisis in Latin America, protesting the fund, NGOs, debt relief, evaluating the IMF, questioning faith, the banking interest the World Bank - early years, poverty and basic needs, structural adjustment, debt relief, revisions, criticizing the Bank, a new Bank? the World Trade Organization (WTO) - history of the GATT, the early GATT Rounds, the Uruguay Round, WTO trade discourse, critique of the WTO, critique of the trade policy review, trade and environment, trade and labour, TRIPS, opposition to the WTO, types of critical response, where does the WTO have to go? the Washin