Popularity: 2
Vote:   | A lot of the old apparatchiks came back in, and corruption really dramatically increased in '94/'95, particularly around Yeltsin's re-election in 1996, when the government used corrupt practices to give money to business, part of which was returned to the campaign coffers, and helped pay for Yeltsin's re-election. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | America's planned contribution to the global AIDS fund is around a sixth of what is needed in 2003, according to the fund itself. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | As of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a kind of professional consensus arose in Washington. It was called a consensus for the world, but how many people really believed all of it is an open question. A consensus came, at least within Washington, about how countries should change from non-market economies to market economies. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Business often does a good job supporting communities: the arts, universities, and scientific enterprises... But that philosophy has rarely reached poor countries. Even businesses that are enlightened in their home bases see Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia as places to exploit natural resources or use cheap labor. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Despite a decade of criticism and budget cuts, the specialised UN agencies have far more expertise and hands-on experience than any other organisations in the world. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Devaluations are never easy. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Development can really work everywhere. But most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Andean region, and Central Asia face obstacles. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | For many parts of the world, the chasm that has to be crossed to get from where they were, whether it's a dictatorship, economic collapse, financial crisis or all of the above, to the other side, that is a working market economy and a functioning democracy, is extraordinarily difficult and requires help. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Globalization was a deep trend pushed by technology and right ideas, as much as anything else. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I think the IMF helped to detonate the Indonesian crisis. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | I'm focusing on a world divided between rich and poor, and a world that doesn't seem to be able to manage the natural base of our lives: air, oceans, or biodiversity. It's a mistake to think that globalization is automatically beneficent and should run its due course-but also to think that it ought to be shut down. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If George Bush spent more time and money on mobilising Weapons of Mass Salvation in addition to combating Weapons of Mass Destruction, we might actually get somewhere in making this planet a safer and more hospitable home. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If the whole world went into recession, all the major central banks could cut interest rates and expand the money supply. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If we did go into a recession, something that's always possible for the U.S. or Europe, we could lower interest rates and expand the money supply without worrying about the price of gold. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If you have a lot of short-term debt, it means that all of that money can be demanded in a very short period of time. Technically, short-term debt means money that's coming due within a year. Typically, it means money that's coming due within 30 to 90 days. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If you have billions and billions of dollars coming due in a country in a short period of time, and if a sense of panic develops among your creditors, so that everybody demands the money out all at once, it's almost inevitable that the debtor economy will collapse, because it won't be able to come up with that amount of money in a short period. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In 1991, a miraculous thing happened, and that's the Soviet Union ended. So there was an opportunity to build a very healthy and new world, on the basis of the change that the Russian people themselves wanted. But for Russia to make that change was going to be one of the most remarkably difficult and complex passages imaginable. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided they'd borrow a bit more and do even better. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | In the early 1990s, when a lot of the developing world opened up to international capital flows... they ended up in very good long-term projects, but projects that weren't going to pay off for five or 10 or 20 years. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It's not so unusual to run out of someone else's currency. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Let's start fresh with Russia on some real help and some real reform. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | My sense is that the IMF does not have a proper modus operandi for the current conditions in the world. They misjudge rhetorically. They misjudge tactically. They misunderstand the dangers of financial panic, and the results are terrible. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | No serious work whatever is under way within the government to link annual budgetary allocations with the international development goals the United States has endorsed. For example, the Bush administration has failed to produce even one credible document spelling out America's role in a global-scale war against AIDS. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Our interconnectedness on the planet is the dominating truth of the 21st century. One stark result is that the world's poor live, and especially die, with the awareness that the United States is doing little to mobilise the weapons of mass salvation that could offer them survival, dignity and eventually the escape from poverty. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Russia has gone through eight years of continuing economic pain. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Russia increasingly lived on short-term borrowing. Now, this was an extraordinary merry-go-round. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Senior development specialists in the Treasury can be counted on one hand. America's government is not even aware of the gap between its commitments and action, because almost nobody in authority understands the actions that would be needed to meet the commitments. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The basic idea was that if a country would put its economy as an integrated piece of the world system, that it would benefit from that with economic growth. I concur with that basic view. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The broader issue of the real role of the U.S., the foreign assistance aspect of that, who's going to pay for the security of a global economy? |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The essential truth for developing countries is, if you try to live by yourself, you will cut yourself off from the amazing progress of world technology. You won't be able to purchase the goods that you need from abroad, because you're not exporting to the rest of the world. You have to be part of the world system. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, understood the twin sides of destruction and salvation. Their war aims were not only to defeat fascism, but to create a world of shared prosperity. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The haphazardness of life and death is absolutely shocking. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The idea that the UN system could provide real leadership on the great development challenges will strain credulity in some quarters. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | The idea that UN commitments should be followed by action is indeed a radical one, especially for the United States, where wilful neglect of its own commitments is the rule. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The longer you wait, the less fun. If you wait until the bitter end, the whole economy can be destroyed. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The runs started in Thailand after the IMF intervened in such a dramatic way. Then the IMF came to Indonesia. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The Russian government not only acted corruptly, not only built up a new oligarchy of billionaires out of nothing, basically, but also gave away its most valuable financial assets-its ownership of the huge natural resource sector in Russia. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The truth of good economic doctoring is to know the general principles, and to really know the specifics. To understand the context, and also, to understand that an economy may need some tender loving care, not just the so-called hard truths, if it's going to get by. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The U.S. has a sound economy. It also has a cyclical economy. It also has stock market values right now that are hard to explain on historical norms. While it's always possible that everything can be based on the new economy, it's also quite possible that we're doing a little bit of exaggeration in just how wonderful things are. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The U.S. is in a bit of a euphoric mood. Euphorias come to an end. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The volatility of international capital is obviously destabilizing markets today. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There's a lot of strength in the U.S., but there's a lot of froth also. The froth will blow off. We're going to have to face up to some realities that we're not fully facing up to right now. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Unfortunately, the real focus in this country has not been on the rest of the world. It's been on our own issues and our own problems. Fair enough. But it means that our simple hopes that everything will just work out abroad aren't really coming to pass. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | We give away tens of billions to Brazil, or to one place or another, without thinking. But in those days, to give even a tiny amount to Russia was viewed almost as anathema by many parts of our own society and our political leadership, whether it was the Bush administration or the Clinton administration. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We, being the Western world, wouldn't let Russia off the hook on debt. So there were demands on debt servicing in the early days until they ran out of reserves. There was no real aid program, just a fictional aid program. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | We're going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There's no question about that. Let's face up to that. We're going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We've taken the view that if the rest of the world would democratize and create market economies, that would spread the benefits of prosperity around the world, and that it would enhance our own prosperity, and our own stability and security, as well. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | When countries open up to trade, they generally benefit, because they can sell more, then they can buy more. And trade has two-way gain. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | When is the last time anybody heard Vice President Dick Cheney even feign a word of concern for the world's poor? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | While the Bush administration is prepared to spend $100 billion to rid Iraq of WMD, it has been unwilling to spend more than 0.2% of that sum... this year on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues. |