IMF har bråda dagar och lånar ut pengar nu i en allt accelererade fart. man ställer sig snart frågan variofrån får IMF alla dessa pengar ifrån och kan det tänkas att det resulterar i någon slags inflation någonstans? För oss redan centralbanks avvoga känns möjligheten att nu även IMF skall kunna utnyttja sedel tryckeri maskinen som en inte särdeles betryggande möjlighet.
The International Monetary Fund this month lent more money to cash-strapped governments than it has in the past five years combined.
The IMF agreed this month to $41.8 billion in loans, approving: $16.4 billion for Ukraine, $15.7 billion for Hungary,$2.1 billion for Iceland and $7.6 billion for Pakistan.
Financing is in the works for Serbia, Turkey, Belarus and Latvia, turning eastern Europe into a regional ward of the IMF the way SoutheastAsia was a decade ago.
Facing a decline in relevance and revenue just a year ago, the IMF under Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn is getting a lift fromthe global credit crisis. Demand for its loans is rising in nations suffering from weaker export sales, banking industry turmoil anddeteriorating investor confidence in the developing world.
"This has arguably been the busiest month in the IMF's 62- year history," said Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist and now asenior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in Washington. "It seems incredible that just six months ago the mainshareholders of the fund -- the G-7 nations -- said the IMF was out of the lending business."
IMF disbursements peaked at $26.6 billion in 2002, according to the fund's records that date back to 1984. The Washington-basedinternational lender was formed by world economic powers in the mid-1940s to create a pool of money for countries in crisis.
Brazil's beat Record in 2002 with USD 30.4BN Loan The largest bailout in IMF history was the September 2002 approval of $30.4 billion for Brazil. South Korea got $21 billion in December 1997, in the midst of the Asian financial crisis of that year in which Indonesia received $11.2 billion and Thailand got $4 billion.
To handle the rush of new requests, the fund in late October approved a short-term lending program that almost doubles the amountdeveloping countries are allowed to borrow.Eligible countries can draw 500 percent of their quota -- the amount they contribute to the IMF -- as many as three times in a 12-monthperiod. The usual IMF loan is three to five years.
"They have gone from zero to 60 miles per hour with great speed," said Jaime Valdivia, who manages $1 billion of assets for EmergingSovereign Group in New York and is a former IMF economist. "I think several countries will eventually take advantage of their new liquidity facility, including South Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines. Romania is a candidate for loans and in the longer term so are Argentina andEcuador."
Japan's Contribution
Japan earlier this month offered to lift the fund's lending capacity to $300 billion, from $200 billion. British Prime MinisterGordon Brown has called on nations with large foreign exchange reserves, such as Saudi Arabia and China, to pledge resources to the IMF.
Developing countries turn to the IMF when private capital sources dry up. Trading in emerging-market debt plunged 43 percent in the thirdquarter to the lowest since 2003 as the global financial crisis choked off demand for higher-yielding securities.
Trading totaled $946 billion in the quarter, down from $1.67 trillion in the year-earlier period, the Emerging Markets TradersAssociation, or EMTA, said in a statement today.
The extra yield investors demand to own emerging-market government bonds instead of U.S. Treasuries climbed in late- October to 8.65percent, the highest in six years, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s EMBI+ index.
A year ago, a newly appointed Strauss-Kahn faced annual losses of $400 million by 2010 if the IMF's business didn't improve and its staffof 2,600 wasn't reduced. Strauss-Kahn, in a statement released a month after taking office in November 2007, said an overhaul of the IMF needed to address the "twin issues of the fund's relevance and legitimacy."
'Lining Up'
International legitimacy no longer is a concern for the IMF, analysts said. "More countries are going to keep lining up outside the IMF's doors," said Win Thin, emerging markets currency strategist at BrownBrothers Harriman & Co. "The longer this crisis goes on, the more countries that will be drawn in." The most vulnerable financially are in eastern Europe, including Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia and Lithuania, Thin said.Ecuador and Venezuela "appear to be heading toward a crisis but for political reasons will exhaust all other options before they go to theIMF," he said. According to Thin's research, six countries in eastern Europe Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia -- haveshort-term debt of 100 percent or more of their reserves.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aSCYZI5nYCsk&refer=home
"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.
The IMF, led by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has the power to raise money on the capital markets by issuing `AAA' bonds under its own name. It has never resorted to this option, preferring to tap members states for deposits.
The nuclear option is to print money by issuing Special Drawing Rights, in effect acting as if it were the world's central bank. This was done briefly after the fall of the Soviet Union but has never been used as systematic tool of policy to head off a global financial crisis.
"The IMF can in theory create liquidity like a central bank," said an informed source. "There are a lot of ideas kicking around."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/3269669/IMF-may-need-to-print-money-as-crisis-spreads.html
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