October 14, 2022
It has been a busy few days for the Latin American and Caribbean region. The Inter-American Development Bank is having its 56th meeting of central bankers and finance ministries in addition, the International Monetary Fund also had a few forums and one of them had the governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank.
The meetings with the IDB were standard, meet and greet and backslapping affairs where multilingual toffs got together to share this year’s latest development flop and brag about how they have misappropriated millions of US dollars. Standard stuff.
However what is new at this meeting was the fact that a female is now the interim head of the bank, Reina Meja, after having replaced outgoing Tump appointee Mauricio Claver-Carone. It was under shady and dubious circumstances as if there was some impropriety that resulted in Mr Carone’s ousting. We have covered this issue already.
Ms Meja came in, guns blazing, looking down her nose at the rest of the region, and gently scolding them to manage the public’s purse better. We agree with her. Good luck with her spreading the gospel. But we believe it will most likely fall on deaf ears. Because as long as there are fixed term elections in all of the countries in the region, we will have leaders who will waste our money on short term goals- and as a result, any reformer quickly runs into the wall of reality of buying votes and padding their pockets in the event they lose power. Vicious cycle we are trapped in in these so called democracies.
Then for ECCB Governor Timothy Antoine, who spoke about capacity development at an IMF forum. Glad to see more Caribbean politicians preaching from the same hymn book now in that we need more financing and access to financing in dealing with climate related impact. There is nothing more to talk about at these hoity-toity forums unless we are talking about that.