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Eurozone Crisis – IMF Intervening as a Consultant, Not as a Bank

In one of these days interviews, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde has suggested that the institution it leads kight go out of its biggest tool to intervene into the countries – its money. If in the past IMF used to help much smaller economies from Latin America or Asia, in the latest Eurozone crisis IMF needs to step in for much larger countries. Spain or Italy are no small feat for it – actually the financial aid for this country is (in the worst case scenario) far beyond IMF’s needs.Read More »Eurozone Crisis – IMF Intervening as a Consultant, Not as a Bank

IMF Reccomends Stronger Measures to Fight the Global Financial Crisis (2)

We come back to the IMF handbook published on April 2009, called “Global Financial Stability Report”. This time, we make refference to its reccomendations.

But before this, a new estimation of the IMF on the global write downs of assets. In January 2009 IMF estiamted the bad assets writing off to around $2.7 billion in the US only. In this latest report, the estimations included also other mature market-originated assets, which could increase the total write offs to around $4 billion. In other words, $4 billion of the US economy has been wiped off by the financial crisis (or will be, total until the end of 2010). Scary, isn’t it?Read More »IMF Reccomends Stronger Measures to Fight the Global Financial Crisis (2)

IMF Reccomends Stronger Measures to Fight the Global Financial Crisis

imf-building-2The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recently published a comprehensive report called “Global Financial Stability Report – Responding to the Financial Crisis and Measuring the Systemic Risk.”. The IMF paper covers the history of the recent global financial crisis, as well as the measures taken by the governments and the companies to fight against it.

The report analyzes why the financial institutions have all been hit so hard by the current financial crisis, from the pension funds to the life insurance companies. These institutions were impacted despite the fact that most of them took preventive measures to manage potential surges in the risks of their assets. The report also underlines that there is a strong retrenchment from foreign markets, which outpaces strongly the overall de-leveraging process. The sharp decline of the cross border funding actuall created the crisis in the emerging markets, whilst the re-financing needs of those markets are still very large (estimated by the IMF at $1.8 trillion in 2009). Read More »IMF Reccomends Stronger Measures to Fight the Global Financial Crisis

IMF Urges Eastern European Countries to Go for the Euro

imf-building-1The International Monetary Fund issued today a statement by which it encouraged the Eastern European countries to adopt Euro as thei currency, in order to avoid the further effects of the financial crisis. An article published in Financial Times today mentioned that:

“For countries in the EU, euro­isation offers the largest benefits in terms of resolving the foreign currency debt overhang [accumulation], removing uncertainty and restoring confidence. Without euroisation, addressing the foreign debt currency overhang would require massive domestic retrenchment in some countries, against growing political resistance.”Read More »IMF Urges Eastern European Countries to Go for the Euro