Calling in loans

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Aug 19 17:20:56 PDT 2002


Joe Stiglitz, in his famous Behind the News interview, gave an extremely interesting analysis of capital market liberalization, in which poor countries actually end up lending to rich ones. But he started out by saying "Let's say a poor African country decides to liberalize it's capital markets. So one of its companies borrows say $100 million from an American bank. The rules of prudence now demand that that country put aside $100 million in reserves, because it knows that that bank can demand that money back at any time."

Is that really true? That normal bank loans to companies are callable in full at any time? They don't have a regular schedule of repayment like mortgages?

Michael



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