Showing posts with label IMF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IMF. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
IMF Approves $900m Loan Payment for Ukraine – BBC News
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
IMF Says UK Faces Five More Years of High Interest Rates
BBC: The UK faces another five years of high interest rates to stem rising prices, an influential global group has warned.
The International Monetary Fund expects the UK to have the highest inflation and slowest growth next year of any G7 economy including the US, France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan.
However, the Treasury said recent revisions to UK growth had not been factored in to the IMF's report.
The outlook was drawn up before this weekend's developments in Israel. » | Lucy Hooker & Faisal Islam, BBC News | Tuesday, October 10, 2023
The International Monetary Fund expects the UK to have the highest inflation and slowest growth next year of any G7 economy including the US, France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan.
However, the Treasury said recent revisions to UK growth had not been factored in to the IMF's report.
The outlook was drawn up before this weekend's developments in Israel. » | Lucy Hooker & Faisal Islam, BBC News | Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Saturday, October 15, 2022
Tuesday, October 11, 2022
IMF Criticises Kwarteng Again over Tax Cuts and Energy Package
THE GUARDIAN: Fund says chancellor’s measures have made Bank of England’s battle against inflation more difficult
Kwasi Kwarteng has come under fresh fire from the International Monetary Fund after the Washington-based organisation said his tax cuts and energy support package had made the Bank of England’s battle against inflation more difficult.
The IMF used its prestigious world economic outlook (WEO) to criticise the scale of the stimulus provided by the chancellor and the blanket nature of the price cap on gas and electricity bills.
It said the UK was on course for a sizeable slowdown in growth from 3.6% this year to 0.3% in 2023 but said its forecasts had been made before Kwarteng delivered his mini-budget on 23 September. » | Larry Elliott in Washington | Tuesday, October 11, 2022
Kwasi Kwarteng has come under fresh fire from the International Monetary Fund after the Washington-based organisation said his tax cuts and energy support package had made the Bank of England’s battle against inflation more difficult.
The IMF used its prestigious world economic outlook (WEO) to criticise the scale of the stimulus provided by the chancellor and the blanket nature of the price cap on gas and electricity bills.
It said the UK was on course for a sizeable slowdown in growth from 3.6% this year to 0.3% in 2023 but said its forecasts had been made before Kwarteng delivered his mini-budget on 23 September. » | Larry Elliott in Washington | Tuesday, October 11, 2022
Friday, September 16, 2016
Italian Minister: "EU Can't Afford to Remain at Status Quo" | Conflict Zone
Friday, July 31, 2015
Greece Crisis Escalates as IMF Witholds Support for a New Bail-out Deal
Talks over an €86bn bail-out for Greece have been thrown into turmoil after just four days as the International Monetary Fund said it would have no involvement in the country until it receives explicit assurances over debt sustainability.
An IMF official said the fund would withhold financial support unless it has guarantees Greece can carry out a "comprehensive" set of reforms and will be the beneficiary of debt relief from its European creditors.
The comments came after the IMF's executive board was told that the institution could no longer continue pumping more money into the debtor nation, according to a leaked document seen by the Financial Times.
The Washington-based Fund has been torn over its involvement in Greece - its largest ever recipient country. The world's "lender of last resort' said it would continue talks with its creditor partners and the Leftist government of Athens, but made it clear the onus of keeping Greece in the eurozone now fell on Europe's reluctant member states.
"There is a need for difficult decisions on both sides... difficult decisions in Greece regarding reforms, and difficult decisions among Greece's European partners about debt relief," said the official.
"One should not be under the illusion that one side of it can fix the problem." » | Mehreen Khan | Thursday, July 30, 2015
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Ukraine: UN Condemns Crimea Vote as IMF and US Back Loans
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| Russian forces seized Crimea's remaining military bases after Ukrainian servicemen withdrew this week |
It comes after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) agreed to a loan deal with Ukraine worth $14-18bn.
The US Congress also passed legislation on Thursday backing a $1bn loan guarantee for Ukraine.
Tensions are high between Russia and the West after pro-Russian troops annexed Ukraine's southern peninsula.
The West has widely condemned the move, with US President Barack Obama warning on Wednesday of "deeper" EU and US sanctions against Russia if it carried out further incursions in Ukraine. » | Thursday, March 27, 2014
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
THE GUARDIAN: Lagarde says world risks falling incomes, environmental damage and social unrest without more sustainable approach to growth
Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, has warned that the world risks a triple crisis of declining incomes, environmental damage and social unrest unless countries adopt a more sustainable approach to economic growth.
Ahead of the Rio+20 Earth summit later this month, she said the rich should restrain their demands for higher incomes while there are still 200 million people worldwide looking for a job and poverty is on the rise.
Giving her clearest backing yet to green taxes and a range of measures to protect the environment, she argued for taxes on petrol-guzzling cars among a range of green measures to tackle climate change.
"It has been 20 years since world leaders first went to Rio to commit to the noble goal of protecting the planet for future generations. And now, 20 years on, we will be journeying back to Rio to affirm our commitment to sustainable development – the idea that we should strive for economic growth, environmental protection and social progress at the same time," she said in a speech in Washington on Tuesday. » | Phillip Inman, economics correspondent | Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Christine Lagarde, the IMF boss who caused international outrage after she suggested in an interview with the Guardian on Friday that beleaguered Greeks might do well to pay their taxes, pays no taxes, it has emerged.
As an official of an international institution, her salary of $467,940 (£298,675) a year plus $83,760 additional allowance a year is not subject to any taxes.
The former French finance minister took over as managing director of the IMF last year when she succeeded her disgraced compatriot Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was forced to resign after he faced charges – later dropped – of sexually attacking a New York hotel maid.
Lagarde, 56, receives a pay and benefits package worth more than American president Barack Obama earns from the United States government, and he pays taxes on it.
The same applies to nearly all United Nations employees – article 34 of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations of 1961, which has been signed by 187 states, declares: "A diplomatic agent shall be exempt from all dues and taxes, personal or real, national, regional or municipal." » | Kim Willsher in Paris | Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Don’t Expect Sympathy, Lagarde Tells Greeks – It’s Payback Time »
Sunday, May 27, 2012
The French managing director of the International Monetary Fund received more than 10,000 messages, many of them obscene, on her page on the online social network - where her postings typically draw a couple of hundred comments.
By late Sunday afternoon a separate Facebook page had sprung up titled "Greeks are against Lagarde".
Its creators described it as "the page through which to show displeasure as a nation towards Lagarde!", with a picture of the IMF chief.
Greeks accused Lagarde on her page of belittling their suffering in an economic crisis that has seen salaries and pensions cut, in a recession now in its fifth year.
Ms Lagarde told The Guardian in an interview published this weekend that Greeks must "help themselves" by all paying taxes, saying she was more concerned about Africans in poverty than Greeks in the economic crisis. » | AFP | Sunday, May 27, 2012
Related »
My comment:
Christine Lagarde comes over as a very cold, hard, self-possessed, aggressive, and ambitious woman. How someone without a specialty in economics could be given this position beats me. She's a generalist in a specialist's role. Her comments about the Greeks' plight were harsh and cruel. In particular, her comments about Greek children showed a level of heartlessness which was surprising, especially coming from a woman. Her words will not endear the Greeks to her, and they won't endear many others to her either. Comparing the conditions children in African schools have to put up with is totally irrelevant to the Greek question; and in any case, not being able to put food in your child's stomach is hardly comparable to three children in Africa having to share a chair in school. – © Mark
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Friday, May 25, 2012
The International Monetary Fund has ratcheted up the pressure on crisis-hit Greece after its managing director, Christine Lagarde, said she has more sympathy for children deprived of decent schooling in sub-Saharan Africa than for many of those facing poverty in Athens.
In an uncompromising interview with the Guardian, Lagarde insists it is payback time for Greece and makes it clear that the IMF has no intention of softening the terms of the country's austerity package.
Using some of the bluntest language of the two-and-a-half-year debt crisis, she says Greek parents have to take responsibility if their children are being affected by spending cuts. "Parents have to pay their tax," she says.
Greece, which has seen its economy shrink by a fifth since the recession began, has been told to cut wages, pensions and public spending in return for financial help from the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank.
Asked whether she is able to block out of her mind the mothers unable to get access to midwives or patients unable to obtain life-saving drugs, Lagarde replies: "I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens." » | Larry Elliott and Decca Aitkenhead | Friday, May 25, 2012
Friday, January 20, 2012
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Anne Sinclair, the wife of fallen International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn has blasted feminists who criticised her for standing by her philandering spouse, saying: "Leave your husband if you want, that's your problem."
But the same poll found that 74 per cent would have left him, if faced with the same situation.
"Well then, leave your husband if you want to want to leave him. That's your problem," she said in a long interview in Elle.
Once tipped to become the next French president, Mr Strauss-Kahn's career has been in tatters since his arrest last May over the alleged rape of a New York hotel maid. Criminal charges were dropped but a civil case is pending.
Mr Strauss-Kahn's name has also been linked to a prostitution ring operating out of a luxury hotel in Lille. He is expected to be questioned over the so-called "Hotel Carlton affair" in the coming weeks.
But his wife, a one-time star political TV journalist and millionaire heiress to an art fortune, dismissed as "unacceptable" claims that she was condoning violence towards women by offering her husband staunch moral and financial support.
"It's unacceptable because there was no violence. If there had been, the prosecutors would have pressed charges. They didn't. Violence horrifies me – verbal violence too To be a feminist is to fight that, not to meddle in the private life of other women to decide in their place what seems moral or not." "I am neither a saint, nor a victim," she added. "I am a free woman." » | Henry Samuel, Paris | Thursday, January 19, 2012
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Four months ago, the former International Monetary Fund chief was paraded unshaven in handcuffs by police in New York after his arrest on charges of seeking to rape Sofitel hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo.
The contrast could not have been starker as the 62 year-old sat wearing make-up on France's TF1 channel, where he was questioned on his judicial ordeal and on economic matters.
Claire Chazal, an anchorwoman on TF1 for 20 years, is a long-standing friend of Mr Strauss-Kahn's loyal wife Anne Sinclair, who worked on the channel for years.
Miss Diallo's lawyers had said that anything less than "pointed questions on his conduct" would turn the prime-time interview into a "publicity stunt".
The tone was friendly, but Miss Chazal pulled few punches, going straight in with the killer question: what happened on the night of May 14 in Sofitel room 2806? » | Henry Samuel, in Paris | Sunday, September 18, 2011
Monday, July 04, 2011
The 32-year-old maid is under intense scrutiny after New York prosecutors were forced to tell a court on Friday that they had found holes in her story that may seriously damage her credibility as a witness.
Reports in New York tabloids alleged that she provided sex for hotel guests in return for money, and that Mr Strauss-Kahn may have misunderstood the situation on May 14.
Mr Strauss-Kahn, who at the weekend was enjoying freedom without bail, is charged with trying to rape her after she arrived to clean his Manhattan Sofitel suite and forcing her to give him oral sex.
But the case against him is hanging by a thread. Reports claim that soon after the incident, she was recorded telling a drug dealer in Arizona: "Don't worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I'm doing".
But what is certain is that the maid told detectives and prosecutors that afterwards "she fled to an area of the main hallway" and "waited there until she observed the defendant leave suite 2806". French newspapers reported on Sunday that the maid married the drug dealer, a Gambian national, last year.
A letter filed to court by Cyrus Vance jr, the Manhattan district attorney, said: "The complainant testified to this version of events when questioned in the Grand Jury about her actions".
However she "has since admitted that this account was false" and that she went on to clean another room, and returned to clean Mr Strauss-Kahn's suite, before reporting the incident to her supervisor.
Professor Kevin Johnson, the dean of the University of California's law school and an expert in immigration law, said: "The department of homeland security could try to reopen her asylum case on the basis that she appears to have lied in her application, and ultimately say that she should be removed from the country. This is an extraordinary case ... I can imagine the department going after her". Read on and comment » | Jon Swaine, New York | Sunday, July 03, 2011
The 32-year-old maid is under intense scrutiny after New York prosecutors were forced to tell a court on Friday that they had found holes in her story that may seriously damage her credibility as a witness.
Reports in New York tabloids alleged that she provided sex for hotel guests in return for money, and that Mr Strauss-Kahn may have misunderstood the situation on May 14.
Mr Strauss-Kahn, who at the weekend was enjoying freedom without bail, is charged with trying to rape her after she arrived to clean his Manhattan Sofitel suite and forcing her to give him oral sex.
But the case against him is hanging by a thread. Reports claim that soon after the incident, she was recorded telling a drug dealer in Arizona: "Don't worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I'm doing".
But what is certain is that the maid told detectives and prosecutors that afterwards "she fled to an area of the main hallway" and "waited there until she observed the defendant leave suite 2806". French newspapers reported on Sunday that the maid married the drug dealer, a Gambian national, last year. » | Jon Swaine, New York | Sunday, July 03, 2011
My comment:
Allah won't be best pleased with this young lady of dubious repute! – © Mark
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Sunday, July 03, 2011
The earlier portrayal of the maid as a pious, devout Muslim was being torn apart in briefings from the defence team and news reports. The New York Post claimed male guests at the Sofitel had paid her for sexual services, quoting an unnamed source close to Mr Strauss-Kahn's defence team.
Last week, investigators received the full translation of a telephone conversation that took place 28 hours after the alleged assault between the maid and a man said to be her boyfriend, who is in an Arizona prison for alleged possession of 180 kilograms of marijuana.
The exchange, in a tribal dialect, was recorded, as is routine in the US. ''She says words to the effect of 'Don't worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I am doing','' a police source said.
Although she also recounted that she had been assaulted, the suggestion that she might have seen some financial advantage to the fallout was deeply troubling for prosecutors. (+ video) » | Peter Finn, Jenna Johnson, Philip Sherwell, London | Monday, July 04, 2011
Saturday, July 02, 2011
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Seven weeks after a haggard and scowling shadow of Dominique Strauss-Kahn was first hauled in front of a New York judge, his old self swaggered into room 1324 at the state supreme court on Friday with a broad smile.
In a crisp navy suit, pressed white shirt and baby blue tie, he beamed like a man already plotting his sensational comeback as a statesman, while New York prosecutors and lawyers for the 32-year-old hotel maid who continues to allege that he tried to rape her looked shell-shocked.
Eight minutes later, the 62-year-old – who had been under house arrest and armed guard in a Manhattan townhouse, wearing an electronic tag – was free. The $1 million (£620,000) cash bail and $5 million (£3.1 million) bond put up by his wife, the wealthy heiress Anne Sinclair, were returned.
Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, an assistant district attorney, told the court that "the fact of a sexual encounter" between the pair, after the maid arrived to clean suite 2086 of the Manhattan Sofitel on May 14, "was and is corroborated by the forensic evidence".
Mr Strauss-Kahn remains charged with forcing the woman to give him oral sex after trying to rape her, before fleeing and being arrested aboard a flight on the tarmac of JFK airport, minutes away from take-off for Paris.
The French Socialist, who had been expected to stand against Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency in 2012, was forced to resign as head of the International Monetary fund five days later, his career apparently in tatters.
However, "substantial credibility issues" have been found with the maid, Ms Illuzzi-Orbon told the court, following a "comprehensive and thorough investigation of all aspects of this case, including the background of the complainant and her various statements about the incident". » | Jon Swaine, New York | Friday, July 01, 2011
My comment:
I said from the start that things didn't add up in this case, and they have been shown not to do so. The case against DSK appeared to be flimsy by anyone's standards. Things that were being said about the chambermaid just didn't add up either. From the beginning, it seemed to me that the chambermaid might have just been fortune-hunting. They tried to say that she didn't know who DSK was. But that didn't ring true. She was cleaning a penthouse suite in a fine hotel. Hotel staff would have informed her whose room she was cleaning, and she would in all probability have been told to pay close attention to detail when cleaning the room, because of the importance of the person staying in the suite. That's how it works in fine hotels, and more especially with guests who are regulars. And, by all accounts, DSK was a regular guest. – © Mark
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Friday, July 01, 2011
The former International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief had his strict bail conditions lifted after he seeked to change them in a New York Court.
He was given his cash bond back but the judge told him he still could not leave the country and authorities retained his travel documents.
Prosecutors told the court the credibility of the hotel maid who accused him had been thrown into question.
Justice Michael Obus said: "I understand that the circumstances of this case have changed substantially ... I release Mr Strauss-Kahn."
But the judge stressed that the "case is not over" and said the French politician was due to appear before the courts again on July 18.
Outside the court, Strauss-Kahn's lawyer said he was confident he "will be exonerated". » | Friday, July 01, 2011
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