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In this respect it corresponds to other global powers. Despite its trumpeted reforms, the International Monetary Fund remains under the control of the United States and the former colonial powers. All constitutional matters still require an 85 percent share of the vote. By an inexplicable oversight, the United States retains 16,7 percent, ensuring that it possesses a veto over subsequent reforms.

Belgium still has eight times the votes of Bangladesh, Italy a bigger share than India and the United Kingdom and France between them more voting power than the 49 African members. The managing director remains, as imperial tradition insists, a European, her deputy an American. The IMF, as a result, is still the means by which Western financial markets project their power into the rest of the world.

Interesting article. Here's another bit:

As the Bretton Woods Project points out, emerging nations with large real economies and small financial sectors were the countries which best weathered the economic crisis, which was caused by advanced economies with large financial sectors. Like the modern opium war it waged in the 1980s and 1990s -- when it forced Asian countries to liberalise their currencies, permitting Western financial speculators to attack them -- the IMF's prescriptions are incomprehensible until they are understood as instruments of financial power.

Decolonisation did not take place until the former colonial powers and the empires of capital on whose behalf they operated had established other means of retaining control. Some, like the IMF and World Bank, have remained almost unchanged.

It is frightening, are we all slaves to the monetary system?

Pretty much. People really fell in line to save the banks when they found out they might lose cable TV.