IMF's Changing Role

▪ 1999

by William Glasgall

       Even for an organization that had worked to alleviate its share of financial panics during more than five decades of existence, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had an extraordinary year by any standard in 1998. As one tense month gave way to the next, the financial crisis that had begun the year before in Thailand spread to East Asia, Russia, and Latin America and was threatening to engulf the industrialized world as well. (See The Troubled World Economy. (Troubled World Economy ))

      According to IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus, the crisis had "already cost hundreds of billions of dollars, millions of jobs, and the unquantifiable tragedy of lost opportunities and lost hope for so many people, particularly among the poorest. . . . Even countries with well-managed economies have not been spared." Yet the traditional remedies the IMF had employed in the past to alleviate such global financial stresses—loans to troubled countries in return for pledges to restrict monetary expansion and rein in budget deficits—seemed curiously inadequate. It was not until the U.S. and other major economies took a series of striking steps that the crisis began to stabilize.

      After months of debate, the U.S. Congress in October 1998 approved an $18 billion contribution to the IMF's capital base, giving the organization $90 billion for additional emergency loans and easing fears that it was about to run out of money. Indeed, the move enabled the IMF and other government leaders to pledge to make available $41 billion in credits for Brazil, where steep budget deficits left the nation's currency vulnerable to speculative attack.

      The U.S. Federal Reserve and central banks in Japan and several European countries cut interest rates and helped ease the crisis further by shoring up global stock markets that had been falling precipitously for months amid fears of a worldwide recession. The Group of Seven (G-7) industrial countries agreed to set up a new IMF facility to provide emergency loans for countries affected by "contagion" from other distressed economies and called for more and better disclosure of emerging-market finances and flows of capital among hedge funds and other large international investors. At the same time, G-7 members called for improved supervision of financial flows from investment banks, hedge funds, and other lenders to emerging markets, the better to spot potentially destabilizing financial bubbles.

      The fact that the IMF and the world financial system needed emergency assistance to get over the latest global crisis should have been no surprise. The size and scope of IMF-led financial-aid programs had increased in recent years, accelerating dramatically after the fall of the Soviet Union and other communist countries in 1989 thrust a new wave of emerging nations into the world economy. The organization itself, however, had not changed significantly since its creation in Bretton Woods, N.H., in 1944 by the U.S. and 43 allies as a critical element in the American-led Western post-World War II alliance.

      Designed to foster monetary cooperation, the IMF sought to enforce strict rules of behaviour in a world based on the gold standard and fixed currency-exchange rates. To help bolster international trade, the IMF also provided short-term financing to countries encountering balance of payments problems. The U.S. abandonment of the gold standard in 1971, however, led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates two years later. The move to floating exchange rates in Western economies forced the IMF to end its role as traffic cop of the world monetary system and to concentrate instead on providing advice and information to its members, which in 1998 numbered 182 countries.

      That role was key in helping nations in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Central Europe restructure their economies following the 1982 debt crisis. Later the IMF sought a more ambitious role as an international lender of last resort to the world economy. It first assumed that position in the international bailout of Mexico in 1995. In return for the imposition of an economic austerity plan, the fund, along with the U.S. and other major industrial countries' central banks, provided credit lines and other facilities totaling $47.8 billion. Although the assistance gave rise to criticism that the IMF was bailing out international investors and not the Mexican economy, the fund in 1997 and 1998 increased the amount each member contributed and expanded its lending activities further by establishing a $47 billion line of credit—called the New Arrangements to Borrow—with two dozen countries.

      The increase in borrowing authority would allow troubled IMF members to draw well in excess of what would normally be allowed, a move that was well timed. In the 1990s capital had flooded into emerging economies—such as Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea—with little attention to borrowers' creditworthiness. When economic problems started to occur, foreign and domestic investors alike rushed to get their money out of those countries. In the ensuing panic, currencies and stock and bond markets imploded, cutting off financing and swiftly throwing entire economies into recession. The crisis persisted, even amid billions of dollars in IMF and Western loan commitments. With the IMF estimating that world economic growth was only 2.2% in 1998, half what it had forecast in late 1997, it became apparent that more forceful moves would be required. Along with the IMF's fortified capital base and widened lending authority, it still was unclear whether widening the disclosure of emerging economies' foreign-currency reserve levels, publicizing their growth estimates, and announcing capital inflows and outflows would help forestall the next crisis—much less put a decisive end to the one that drew headlines in 1998. This was because the entire face of international finance had changed since the IMF was created.

      Financial flows were once controlled by a handful of major banks that could be easily corralled into restructuring problem loans in cooperation with relatively modest IMF assistance. In the late 1990s, however, flows were dominated by thousands of banks; securities firms; and mutual, pension, and hedge funds that could move capital in and out of countries with a click of a computer mouse. The number of countries seeking international investment, meanwhile, had proliferated, as had the diversity of debt, equity, and other financial instruments. This array of investors and instruments made coordinating any response to financial crises "extremely difficult," concluded Moody's Investors Service Inc., a major global credit-rating agency.

      The IMF, meanwhile, continued to face criticism that it was secretive in its dealings, undemocratic in its makeup, and unresponsive to the needs of poorer members. Many critics noted that the economic austerity programs that were typically attached to any IMF assistance were not always appropriate. In some cases spending cuts only deepened local recessions and made the task of necessary financial and industrial restructurings all the more difficult.

      Some economists, including Jeffrey D. Sachs, the director of the Harvard Institute for International Development, believed the IMF should permit countries to essentially go bankrupt, imposing formal suspensions of loan payments while creditors and debtors negotiated the value of the loans and determined whether any loans could be exchanged for equity. During the negotiations a troubled country could continue to obtain new financing and exporters could conduct business, selling their goods and earning foreign currencies vital to a country's economic revival.

      Suggestions such as these, if they were accepted, might require years to be put into practice. If the crisis of 1998 had one lesson, it was that nothing short of "a cooperative effort by the entire world community is needed to repair the major shortcomings in the global system," according to Camdessus. The question was whether the repairs would be performed quickly enough to enable the IMF and its backers to cope with the next financial implosion.

William Glasgall is Senior Editor of Business Week magazine.

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