The International Monetary Fund could buy Spanish or Italian bonds alongside the Euro zone bailout fund if needed, to help boost investor confidence in those countries, the IMF Europe head Antonio Borges said on Wednesday.
Greece’s striking public sector workers blockaded the entrance to several ministries in Athens on the second anniversary of the ruling Socialist party's election victory, disrupting talks with EU and IMF inspectors on the next aid tranche.
Argentine Economy Minister Amado Boudou urged countries in the region to “seize the opportunity created as a result of the crisis affecting developed nations and implement their own solutions.”
Nicolas Eyzaguirre, the IMF director for Latin America, stated that Argentina must apply “major measures” to improve its method of measuring the inflation.
The head of the IMF for the Western Hemisphere Department Nicolás Eyzaguirre discards an outflow of capitals from Latin America as a consequence of the current global situation and pointed out that the region’s position is solid.
The Argentine Central Bank Governor Mercedes Marcó del Pont dismissed the IMF’s warning on the risk of overheating economies in developing countries.
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that the European debt crisis and the political divisions in the United States were the biggest threats to the global economy.
The head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, said on Thursday that she wants a “constructive dialogue” with Argentina, while at the same time warned that she is not willing to make any “concessions” in terms of the quality of official data the IMF receives from member countries.
The International Monetary Fund re-activated this week a 571 billion dollars resource pool to ensure it has funds to help cover Europe's worsening sovereign-debt crisis. The IMF extended activation of its so-called New Arrangements to Borrow for a six-month period from October.
The International Monetary Fund will use estimates from the private sector and provincial governments to measure economic growth and inflation in Argentina, underscoring the IMF distrust of official data.