The IMF’s Regional Reinforcement Rehash
Ahead of the next annual meetings the IMF’s Policy Review Department has published background papers on potential elements of an expanded global financial safety net leveraging Fund resources, a priority identified under the Managing Director’s work program and endorsed by major county shareholders. They have agreed in principle on an increased backstop beyond the existing prequalified contingency credit and new coordination approaches, with existing regional mechanisms profiled in a case studies document of a half-dozen recent crisis flare-ups. It looks at emerging economy constructs in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America and through the BRICS, with a particular focus on information sharing, surveillance capacity, and loan instruments to examine likely Fund facility fits. The analysis separately sketches out a quantitative contagion model that could serve as a future collaboration basis and sequence emergency partnerships according to the formula. The Arab Monetary Fund, founded 40 years ago, has $5 billion in capital and twenty members and was designed to correct balance of payments problems, including sudden oil import difficulties. It offers trade reform, broader structural adjustment and short-term liquidity assistance, and recent operations involved Egypt, Jordan, Mauritania and Sudan. The BRICS’ $100 billion contingent reserve was launched in 2014 with China’s contribution highest at $40 billion. It has not been tapped yet, but rules call for one-third access to currency lines with member agreement, and the remaining available with a formal IMF arrangement. The Chiang Mai Initiative among the Asean+3, a bilateral and multilateral swap regime, has been in place since 2000 with $250 billion on hand. It too offers 30 percent immediately and the rest tied to a Fund program, and has conducted “test runs” while never formally tapped. Members did help Indonesia with backup support during the 2008 crash in de facto application, although the episode passed in short order.
The Eurasian Fund was set up a decade ago by Russia and five CIS neighbors with the biggest Kazakhstan. It can provide $8.5 billion including grants for social purposes, and extended balance of payments aid to Belarus and Tajikistan and infrastructure credit to Armenia and the Kyrgyz Republic. Non-euro EU states have an EUR 50 billion kitty from 2002 predating the 2015 Stabilization Mechanism for the sovereign debt crisis, which was drawn on by Hungary, Latvia and Romania. The ESM’s current size is around EUR 700 billion and has been deployed on multiple occasions in Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus and Greece. Its writ goes beyond traditional external reserves protection in view of the single currency to encompass secondary bond buying and bank recapitalization with central bank consultation. Latin America has its own four decade-old Reserve pool among seven economies with maximum capacity below $5 billion. Ecuador and Venezuela received $500 million range loans and central banks in Colombia and Peru got technical help. Europe the past decade provided all the case evaluations, and they show differences over conditionality, responsibility, burden-sharing and timeliness. Joint reviews were often uncoordinated to undermine confidence and momentum, and out of six experiences listed only Hungary was a clear success in terms of effective collaboration which required the parties to defer to respective “comparative advantages” in know-how and judgment as important as money at stake in future anti-crisis recipes, the authors imply.
