Posted on 12/07/2005 5:21:01 PM PST by BenLurkin
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The World Bank's board is expected next week to formally approve a plan to wipe out poor countries' debt, the lending institution's' president, Paul Wolfowitz, said Wednesday.
"It will be in their hands to decide early next week," he told reporters.
The plan would forgive nearly $40 billion worth of debt for 18 poor countries, most of them in Africa, over a 40-year period, he said.
Wolfowitz believed the World Bank would be able to start providing debt forgiveness to countries by the middle of next year.
The expected approval by the World Bank board would mostly be a formality. Financial leaders nailed down the landmark debt-foregiveness plan at meetings in late September of the 184-nation World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
A general framework for the deal was endorsed by leaders of the world's eight major industrial powers at an economic meeting in July in Scotland. The details of putting the deal in place were left largely to the World Bank and the IMF to settle.
By canceling debts owed to the World Bank, the IMF and the African Development Bank, poor countries could use the money for education or drugs to fight HIV/AIDS or malaria, supporters of debt forgiveness say.
A major breakthrough on the debt cancellation deal came in late September when finance officials from the world's richest countries agreed to put up all the money to cover the loan repayments lost when the debt are written off. Those commitments allayed concerns that the lending institutions would be financially impaired.
Wrote that debt off? Whose money is that?
The World Bank better never make another loan to these deadbeats.
Now does anyone think this would have ever been done without the work and influence of Bono? Mock him if you will but there is a man that used his talent ( in the Biblical sense) the right way.
"By canceling debts owed to the World Bank, the IMF and the African Development Bank, poor countries could use the money for education or drugs to fight HIV/AIDS or malaria, supporters of debt forgiveness say. "
They could also use the money for palaces for their ruling elite, equipping their militaries for pogroms against their "undesirables", and stashing buckets of lucre in Swiss accounts.
But hey, maybe I'm too cynical.
Who do I go to have all of my debts forgiven?
I don't see this as a good thing.
Sure wish they could write off my home loan. Instead I have to wipe out my own debt in thirty years (instead of forty) one month at a time.
Call Bono I guess.
Why should the debt be forgiven? The money for it will have to come from somewhere, and those that pay for it are being robbed....that is you and me and the rest of the productive world.
This ought to be titled...
World Bank Can't Spend West's Money Fast Enough
Who's going to wipe our debt out?
I think that's at least in part my money circling the World Bank basin. Cawooooosh!
Byyyyyyyyyeeeee! I was fond of those lovely greenbacks.
Given how much of this money comes from the U.S. (i.e. taxpayers), I'd say we just got boned by Bono...in a Biblical sense of course.
So how many dictator-thugs will this help keep in power?
The Lord God, through Jesus Christ.
This development should make it evident to even the thickest dullard that the World Bank is not subject to the same market forces that dictate the corporate lives or lack thereof of other financial entities, and therefore is an extralegal institution answerable to no authority.
"The World Bank's board is expected next week to formally approve a plan to wipe out poor countries' debt"
in other word-they owe more than they are worth
Those loans, in large part, are our tax dollars.
"Whose money is that?"
Mostly United States citizen's. We give it up in the form of a hidden tax called inflation!
The World Bank is the global equivalent of the Federal Reserve here in the United States. Each are producers of fiat money responsible for the devaluation of our currency.
For a good overview of central banking and the international banking cartel, get a copy of the book "The Creature fom Jekyll Island".
I'd like a little of that to pay off the education loans for our kids.
Thanks.
I met Eugene Black, the first head of the World Bank, a number of times when he used to visit some friends of ours in Maine during the summer. I was crewing on a sailboat and we would sit out on the porch afterwards for tea.
He seemed to be a decent guy. The histories I have read since suggest that he was pretty straight and honest, unlike his successors. I think there really was an intention to help people out, although I suppose it's always possible that someone in the background had other, more sinister agendas, like population control. I'm pretty sure the Rockefellers were behind it, and that was their agenda back then, though I didn't realize it at the time.
In any case, all these international institutions have been going downhill ever since. Whatever good they may have done in the early days has long since vanished.
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