Thread: INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK -1959

Do you know of this bank?...and look at the last link.
Explore that link, it'll open your eyes a bit further on how we got to ths point.

http://www.iadb.org/aboutus/I/members.c ... ge=English

The IDB was founded in 1959 as a partnership between 19 Latin American countries and the United States. The original member countries were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela and the United States.
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Today, the IDB is owned by 47 member states, of which 26 are borrowing members in Latin America and the Caribbean. Each member country's voting power is based on its subscription to the institution's Ordinary Capital (OC) resources.

To become a regional member, a country needs prior membership to the Organization of the American States. To become a non-regional member, a country needs to be a member of the International Monetary Fund. A second basic requirement in both cases is the subscription of shares of the Ordinary Capital and contribution to the Fund for Special Operations.


Agreement Establishing the IDB
Annual Report
Annual Meetings
Countries
Ownership
Eighth Replenishment
Fund for Special Operations
Institutional Strategy
Ordinary Capital
Voting Power


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How about this Organization?

http://www.summit-americas.org/summit.htm

whenever I see the word "sustainable" the hair on the back on my neck stands up!

What Does the IDB Do?


The Inter-American Development Bank helps foster sustainable economic and social development in Latin America and the Caribbean through its lending operations, leadership in regional initiatives, research and knowledge dissemination activities, institutes and programs.

The Bank assists its Latin American and Caribbean borrowing member countries in formulating development policies and provides financing and technical assistance to achieve environmentally sustainable economic growth and increase competitiveness, enhance social equity and fight poverty, modernize the state, and foster free trade and regional integration.

By the end of 2005, the Bank had approved over $137 billion in loans and guarantees to finance projects with investments totaling $326 billion, as well as $2.1 billion in grants and contingent-recovery technical cooperation financing.

Public entities eligible to borrow from the Bank include national, provincial, state and municipal governments, and autonomous public institutions. Civil society organizations and private companies are also eligible.

http://www.iadb.org/idbamerica/index.cfm?thisid=4137

Moreno and Clinton salute the audience following their conversation at the IDB conference.

INTERVIEW
‘[Politics] is still the best hope we have for solving our problems’
Former U. S. President Bill Clinton and IDB President Moreno discuss public service and the challenges facing Latin America

A highlight of the IDB’s “Building Opportunities for the Majority” conference in June was a conversation between Luis Alberto Moreno, the Bank’s president, and Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States. Clinton participated in the conference because the IDB’s new initiative dovetails with many of the activities of the William J. Clinton Foundation. Moreno and Clinton discussed a wide range of topics, including inequality, trade, alternative energy, AIDS and the rewards of public service. Following are some selections.

Moreno: Mr. President, as you know, we have had 12 elections in Latin America this year. I’d like you to imagine that you’ve been invited to dinner with a newly elected Latin American president. This president has won with a small majority, and he has to balance the fiscal challenges entailed by social spending and the need to create economic growth—all of this while trying to close the tremendous inequality gap that we have in Latin America. What would you advise this president to do?

Clinton: …We have to face the fact that [Latin America] has not been successful at reducing inequality. And it seems to me that basically there have been two models. One model is to follow fiscal conservatism, keep your currency stable, avoid inflation, allow the existing economic units to generate wealth and growth, and don’t do much social spending. Or alternatively, do a lot of social spending in the absence of fiscal responsibility and then try to figure out what to do next. Neither model has produced what any democratic society needs, which is a broadly successful and growing middle-class people moving from poverty into the middle class…

So, my view is that if you limit yourself to yesterday’s debate, that is fiscal responsibility versus more social spending, you are going to wind up with disappointment. Because you won’t reduce inequality that way, and you don’t want to just appropriate the assets of the state, or the assets of the wealthy. What you want to do is to empower poor people to create wealth, to become a middle class that supports a stable society. And I think you can only do it through trial and error and a commitment on the part of international institutions like yours, and national governments, to create the conditions that will enable that to occur. You can do it by focusing on identity through birth certificates or other aspects of the property rights revolution that Hernando de Soto started in his native country that still is just beginning in Latin America and elsewhere…

The barriers to entry for new businesses in Latin America are still too high in most countries. The time it takes to start a business is too long. The enforceability of contracts is too much in question. You need to think about all these micro-economic things and create the conditions in which people can join the middle class. One of the things that I see, the more I travel and the longer I live, is that intelligence and hard work are evenly distributed throughout the world. But opportunity and investment and organization are not. The systems often don’t exist for clever, hardworking, inventive poor people to be rewarded for their endeavors.

Moreno: In 1992? we had the Summit of the Americas in Miami; it seemed like a great moment for Latin America, and as a result several deadlines for trade agreements were established. Today, that trade agenda has become much more difficult to implement for both the U.S. and Latin American countries. How would you recommend that we reenergize this trade agenda?

Clinton: If the debate becomes just about whether trade is good or bad, there will always be some people who are negatively affected by it in the short run. And therefore, if a country has other problems, it becomes easy to blame it on globalization. The truth is in the last 20 years more people have moved out of poverty in the world as a whole than at any time in history, but … the trade system alone has not been able to generate enough economic activity to avoid severe dislocations from a globalized and interdependent economy.

So, it’s easy to blame trade for the problems people face, both in poor countries and in rich ones. When you look at the Europeans and the Americans, you see that a lot of our working people and middle-class people are growing more protectionists because all they see is the downside. That’s partly because governments have not figured out how to help people make more rapid adjustments. In our case, we haven’t found a source of new and high paying jobs in this decade, largely because we haven’t made a commitment to a clean energy future, I think…

If you don’t achieve the economies of scale that come from trade, I can’t see how lower-income countries are going to be better off. If you believe as I do… that trade is on balance a big net-plus for poor nations, then there have to be the kind of internal changes within those nations, and the kind of policies from the international donor community, that will be trade-plus. I think a lot of us, including me when I first got elected … believed that [trade] would lift all boats. But it doesn’t lift all boats without the proper kind of internal economic and social policies that have to be developed over time and with the support of institutions like yours. So, if you want to fight the anti-trade crowd, you have to have a trade-plus policy.

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The amount of money being made off the illegals sending money back home is Big Business. No wonder all the photos show them all smiling. See what the President of the IDB bank says here:

http://www.iadb.org/idbamerica/index.cfm?thisid=4093

" Latin America’s thriving microfinance sector is a leader in this trend. In addition to extending millions of small loans to people shunned by traditional banks, microfinance institutions are now offering debit cards, housing loans and money transfer services aimed at leveraging the remittances Latin American immigrants send home, which last year rose to US $53.6 billion. This market has become so enticing that some of the region’s big commercial lenders are belatedly “pushing down” into the low-income population with new products and services."

Think that Hector E. Morales, Jr. is getting any kickbacks or still maintains stock in his company in his or family name?

http://www.ustreas.gov/organization/bios/morales-e.html

Treasury Officials

Hector E. Morales, Jr.

Executive Director of U.S. Inter-American Development Bank

Hector Morales Jr. was confirmed to be the United States Executive Director to the Inter-American Development Bank by President George W. Bush on December 9, 2004. Prior to his nomination he served as Alternate Executive Director, which began on December 19, 2003. He has more than fifteen years of experience in U.S./Latin American commerce, both as a businessman and a lawyer.

Prior to his position at the IDB, Mr. Morales served as a consultant to companies focused on providing financial services to the Latin American and U.S. Hispanic markets, including the world's leading micro-lender to Latin America and a community development bank based in New York. He was formerly Senior Vice President of Viamericas Corporation, a path -breaking company that offered the first pre-paid money transfer card in the U.S. to the Latin American remittance market. At Viamericas, Mr. Morales was responsible for strategic planning as well as sales, marketing, and distribution.

Between 1997 and 2000, Mr. Morales spent four years in Argentina as President and General Manager of Reliant Energy Argentina. He joined Reliant Energy, a publicly traded company based in Houston, in 1993 as an attorney in the international law department. In 1995, he became Director of Project Development for Latin America and the Caribbean. Before joining Reliant, Mr. Morales was in private practice as a business lawyer at Graves, Dougherty, Hearon & Moody in Austin, Texas and Crain, Caton & James in Houston, Texas. Mr. Morales received his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and his B.A. in history from Columbia College in New York City .