Financial Times - September 1, 2000
IMF reveals its financial secrets By Stephen Fidler in Washington
The International Monetary Fund on Thursday further opened its books to public scrutiny, detailing for the first time which governments provide it with resources.
The fund has been gradually becoming more open about its finances in response to criticism from the US Congress and others that it has been an excessively secretive organisation.
The new disclosures show 36 governments on the list of those standing ready to provide the IMF with funds at the end of May, though only 34 had actually provided resources. The two others - Trinidad and Tobago and the Czech Republic, the host of this month's annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank - had recently joined the creditor group and their resources had not been called on.
The disclosures had been strongly resisted by some governments.
They argued that financial markets would react adversely to a withdrawal from the list on the basis that it could indicate developing financial problems. As a result of these concerns, the list of those providing finance will be published with a three-month lag.
Withdrawals and additions to the creditor list are reasonably frequent.
The US itself withdrew during the dollar's travails in 1978, and the new disclosures suggest that some rich oil-producing nations have only recently returned to the creditor group following the rally in world oil prices.
These include Saudi Arabia, Brunei and Kuwait. Normally the IMF's management tries to withdraw funds from each creditor government roughly in proportion to its "quota" in the organisation, a figure calculated approximately in accordance with each country's economic importance.
About 30 per cent of most creditors' quotas was being extended to the IMF in May. However, the percentage of the Saudi quota that had been made available to the organisation was only 14.1 per cent, suggesting it had recently rejoined the list and borrowings from the IMF since then had not been heavy enough to raise the percentage to 30 per cent.
The IMF has recently begun publishing aggregate figures on a weekly basis of its overall financial position, which has indicated that it has plentiful liquidity following the repayment of a large number of loans drawn down during the financial crises of 1997-98.