IMF Executive Board Approves Major Expansion of Fund’s Borrowing Arrangements

The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) today approved a ten-fold expansion of the Fund’s New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB) and the transformation of the Fund’s premier standing credit arrangement into a more flexible and effective tool of crisis management. The NAB will be increased by SDR 333.5 billion (about US$500 billion) to SDR 367.5 billion (about US$550 billion), representing a major increase in the resources available for the Fund’s lending to its members.

This responds to the call by the leaders of the Group of 20 (G-20) economies, endorsed by the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), to increase the financing available to the Fund, through an expanded and more flexible NAB increased by up to US$500 billion. Thirteen new participants, including a number of major emerging market economies, have indicated their willingness to join 26 current participants in the NAB. The decision today follows the agreement reached by current and prospective participants at their meeting in Washington in November 2009 on the key elements of an expanded and more flexible NAB.

“The expansion and enlargement of the NAB borrowing arrangements provides a very strong multilateral foundation for the Fund’s efforts in crisis prevention and resolution, as an essential back-stop to the Fund’s quota resources. This will help ensure that the Fund has access to adequate resources to help members that are vulnerable to financial crises,” IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.

The NAB is a standing set of credit arrangements under which participants commit resources to IMF lending when these are needed to supplement quota resources. The expanded NAB will become operational when it receives formal acceptances from the required proportion of current and potential participants, which will require legislative backing in some cases.1

“The expansion of the NAB will make an important contribution to global financial stability, but it is not a substitute for a general increase in the Fund’s quota resources. The Fund is, and shall remain, a quota-based institution. It is important now that member countries rapidly take the necessary steps to make the increased resources available,” Mr. Strauss-Kahn underscored.

The NAB is a credit arrangement between the IMF and a group of members and institutions to provide supplementary resources to the IMF when these are needed to forestall or cope with an impairment of the international monetary system. The NAB is supplementary to quota resources, which are made up of the quota subscriptions each country pays upon joining the Fund, broadly based on its relative size in the world economy. IMF members’ quotas currently total SDR 217.4 billion (about US$330 billion). Like quota allocations, the NAB is reviewed on a regular basis.

The recent unprecedented shock confronting the global economy has led to a sharp increase in the demand for IMF financing. To ensure that the IMF continues to have sufficient resources to meet demand, leaders of the G-20 agreed in April 2009 that immediate financing from members of US$250 billion would subsequently be folded into an expanded and more flexible NAB, increased by up to $500 billion. This call was endorsed by the IMFC. The G-20 leaders reaffirmed their commitment on September 25, 2009 to a tripling of the resources available to the IMF, from a pre-crisis level of about US$250 billion. At its meeting in October 2009, the IMFC welcomed the expected agreement to expand and enhance the NAB.

Pending the entering into force of the expanded NAB, member countries have pledged more than $300 billion in immediate bilateral financing should the Fund require additional resources for lending.

The IMF is increasingly open about its new role as the Central Bank of the World - accountable to nobody in practice. They are inflating their balance sheet faster than anybody... faster that the U.S. Federal Reserve; both are pumping their balance sheets up with truly worthless assets, but not acknowledging their worthlessness.

The IMF did not previously have much debt at all, but now they have huge and exploding amounts, and everybody knows it will never be repaid and that the corresponding assets on their books are falsely recorded. Many believe that the IMF really has little or no physical gold, that what they do "have" is really leased/swapped to them by member countries which still claim ownership of that gold on their books.

They use it to create leverage on phantom gold. Aka crap loaded with frosting.

Central banks such as those in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany see that like it or not, increased transparency will be forced on them by domestic political realities, meaning that they now need another, non-transparent, non-accountable "shell" to hide behind to preserve an undeserved international confidence in the teetering house-of-cards financial system and fiat currencies. Enter the IMF... one more grand-scale international facade. Global Musical Chairs that can't readily be exposed due to its structure.

Message here: don't get caught with most of your life savings primarily being "invested" in what will turn out to be largely worthless paper claims (dollar denominated paper assets or currency) when the "music" stops in this game, eventually.

Note this statement from the IMF representative: "It is important now that member countries rapidly take the necessary steps to make the increased resources available...” What does that mean? It means that the U.S., Germany, Japan, the U.K., etc. need to run their printing presses in hyper drive for a while longer in order to give more (already) worthless paper money to the IMF so that the IMF can, with its own version of fractional reserve banking, multiply that money greatly and provide it to others to pay for still more worthless paper assets held by failing states and financial institutions.

WHAT A SCAM! Who knows for how long this can continue... Meanwhile, the banksters skim off and pocket what they can, with impunity.

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