New Zealand borrows to lend to the IMF

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NZ borrowing to lend to IMF, the latest absurdity

Deidre Kent

New Economics Party,

20 June, 2012

It’s a strange world this world of money.

In the melee of the Greek elections and the frantic ramming through of the asset sales legislation came a strange announcement, but it was lost. It wasn’t even reported in the Dominion Post. The Government would be lending $1.26 billion to the IMF’s new bailout fund for the debt-wrecked Eurozone, but it would have to borrow this first. In addition to earlier billions for the stabiilty fund, the total cost to NZ would now be over $4 billion, according to Bill English.

Ponder on that one! We borrow in order to lend in order to save Europe. Whew. The child in us will ask how money is created in the first place. Can only banks create money? Of course not. We the people can create our own money without the burden of interest. But we stupidly use banks. These days we don’t even use our own banks. So to add insult to injury, when we want to borrow, we go to overseas banks for loans because their rates are cheaper.

So let’s get this again. We borrow $1.26 billion at interest and then lend it to the IMF. What? At interest? They don’t say. And they will give it back, the part they don’t use apparently. The Minister of Finance says it is our insurance policy. And it is the banks who are in trouble. So we pay interest to the overseas banks so we can protect them from future bad debts. This is Alice in Blunderland stuff. Where is the cartoonist?

Reuters has just reported “Ireland’s High Court began hearing a challenge to the European Union’s new bailout fund on Tuesday, launched by a politician who said the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was not compatible with the Irish constitution.”

The Guardian reports: “This, for certain, is a high stakes game. Part of Europe’s fighting fund has already been spent on bailing out Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Spain has also pledged funds to the EFSF and ESM, and these clearly cannot be spent buying up the country’s own debt…. If the gamble fails, Spain will still need a bailout and Europe will have nothing left in the kitty for Italy.”

So let’s go back to the Pre-election Fiscal Update and see what it assumed about Europe. I seem to remember …yes here it is: The PREFU’s main forecasts critically assume the reasonably orderly resolution of sovereign debt problems in the euro area. Wow they were so wrong. And these our best economists and financial experts? An ordinary person listening to the news can do better. They could see that if you are solving debt by lending ever more money to a country, the problem won’t be solved.

And here is another thought. If Greece is too big to fail, and Spain is too big to fail and Europe is too big to fail, then it is going to apply to UK, US and China too. Who knows where it will stop? The size of the global economy is about $63 trillion. According to Bernard Lietaer et al in Money and Sustainability, the Missing Link, “one day’s currency speculation represents more than the annual economic output of Germany or China changing hands. The notional amount of currency derivatives are now more than $700 trillion today. Currency derivatives by themselves represent therefore almost nine times the entire global annual GDP”. And that is only one type of derivative.

No, the IMF’s bailout fund is going to fail and it must fail because it can never match the power of the investment banks.