Cheers, ken
http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2013/pr13281.htm
The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund has decided that Ukraine is expected to engage in post-program monitoring1 with the Fund, following the expiration on December 27, 2012 of the 29-month Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) with exceptional access (SDR 10 billion; US$ 15.2 billion; 729 percent of quota). The program went off-track with only two purchases made in the total amount of SDR 2.25 billion (about US$ 3.4 billion). As of June 30, 2013 Ukraine’s outstanding credit to the Fund was SDR 5.27 billion (about US$ 8 billion; 383.8 percent of quota). The Board's decision was adopted on a lapse-of-time basis2 on Friday, July 26.
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On Monday, September 15, 2014 10:23 AM, ken hanly <northsunm at yahoo.com> wrote:
Your link says; the IMF approved a $17 billion loan program to Ukraine’s junta. Normal IMF practice is to lend only up to twice a country’s quote in one year. This was eight times as high.
Did he mean quota? How is the quota determined?
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On Wednesday, September 10, 2014 5:02 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
Below, a link to probing article from the economist Michael Hudson on the $17 billion IMF loan to Ukraine as an instrument of US/EU policy. The loan is eight times the normal IMF quota, the first ever to a warring side in a civil war, and in violation of an IMF statute prohibiting loans to countries whose ability to repay is doubtful.
Hudson claims the loan has had a dual purpose: (1) to temporarily prop up the collapsing Ukrainian hryvnia, allowing the country’s oligarchs to convert their holdings to euros and dollars before the currency plunged further and (2) to support the military buildup and assault against the Russian-speaking eastern regions. Little or nothing is slated to be directed towards reconstruction of the east’s shattered infrastructure and flattened homes, schools, hospitals, and factories.
The only conceivable way Ukraine will be able to repay the loan will be to sell off its gas reserves and farmland to Western interests, but Russia has a strong legal claim on the amount for gas arrears and future deliveries as winter nears. US and British politicians and policymakers are trying to devise ways to declare Ukraine’s prior obligations to Russia as “odious debt” but, as Hudson notes, the precedent could render vulnerable their own intergovernmental loans, typically extended for military or political purposes.
Hudson is a former Wall Street analyst who now teaches at the University of Missouri in St. Louis.
http://michael-hudson.com/2014/09/losing-credibility-the-imfs-new-cold-war-loan-to-ukraine/ ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk