U.S. President Barack Obama Monday asked Congress to back an expansion of an IMF emergency fund by $500 billion in a move designed to expand its reach to big emerging-market nations.
Obama also asked lawmakers to approve a U.S. contribution to the fund to $100 billion, as part of the plan to swell International Monetary Fund reserves agreed at this month’s Group of 20 industrial and developing nations summit in London.
At the G20 summit, “the Germans did not want an EU effort to bail out the banks,” reported the Asia Times. “They wanted the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bail out a substantial part of the EU financial system instead. The reason was simple: The IMF receives loans from the United States, as well as China and Japan, meaning the Europeans would be joined by others in underwriting the bailout. The United States has signaled it would be willing to contribute $100 billion to the IMF, of which a substantial portion would go to Central Europe. (Of the current loans given by the IMF, roughly 80% have gone to the struggling economies in Central Europe.)”
The president made the request in several letters to Democratic and Republican congressional leaders Monday, pointing out that the fund didn’t require an extra financial outlay from the U.S.
Posts
0 comments
Post a Comment