Word: imf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...this: at the end of the month, "Banco del Sur" will launch as a direct competitor to the World Bank, at least in South America. The brainchild of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, who has long railed against the meddling of the Washington-dominated World Bank and IMF, the development bank got a credibility boost when Brazil, Argentina and others signed on as founding members. With the region's new oil wealth, the dream of locally funding big infrastructure projects without First World interference may be closer than ever...
This dragged-out mess, though, is a distraction. The bigger issue is that the Washington-based bank and its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are struggling to justify their continued existence...
...situation is most pressing for the smaller IMF, which pays its bills with the profits it makes lending money to middle-income countries in financial trouble. With hardly any such countries in trouble these days, the organization is projecting a $224 million deficit for this fiscal year and asking its member nations if it can start selling off some of the gold they deposited with it after World War II (the answer...
...World Bank isn't that desperate, but it faces similar pressures. Both organizations were created in 1944 by the soon-to-be-victorious Allied powers. At the time, says Harvard professor and former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff, "global financial markets barely existed, and domestic financial markets barely existed in Europe...
...Others argue that the global economy is now better able to withstand potential shocks such as slower Chinese growth because it's more flexible and healthier, and because interest rates around the globe are relatively low. Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor and former chief economist at the IMF, believes Asia is not immune to a sharp U.S. slowdown, although he says Europe may be better insulated because of its big internal market, which now covers 490 million people. But he also points out that, until the early 1990s, Japan was a vital source of global growth that virtually disappeared during...