After decades of promoting neoliberal economic policies around the globe, the International Monetary Fund has admitted in a new report that neoliberalism fuels both inequality and hurts growth.

A new report appearing in June volume of the IMF's quarterly magazine Finance & Development says that privatization, austerity, and free markets have resulted in less benefits than expected.  The study has come to three conclusions: neoliberal policies don’t result in much growth, neoliberal policies increase inequality, and increased inequality hurts the level and sustainability of growth.

Neoliberalism causes epic crashes that leave behind human wreckage and cost billions to clean up.  But one doesn't have to live in Greece or Spain to know that it hasn't delivered economic growth, and global 1 percent even wealthier.  As Oxfam reported earlier this year, the wealthiest 1 percent in the world now has as much wealth as the rest of the planet's population combined.

The IMF report points to so-called successes of neoliberalism, such as in Chile.  But it fails to mention that the economic vision was applied in the country through the US-backed fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and was enforced with torture and murder.  And assessments of Chile's fiscal health usually bypassed or ignored those at the bottom of society, as well as the economic and social unexploded ordnance that successive governments have had to deal with - such as the current government's to extend quality higher education to the middle and working classes.