Bankers stifle, Latin America takes a breather

There’s a game played by pretty well every banker who frequents development bank meetings. It could be called “What’s the Mood?” Delegates look back on the chaos of the IMF annual meetings in September 1999, when Ecuador defaulted, or the unleavened pessimism of the IMF meetings a year earlier, held in the shadow of the disastrous Russian crisis. This year’s Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) meetings can be summed up by the word “malaise”.

In contrast to the Mexican and Brazilian crises of 1995 and 1999, it seems that there is nothing to be done about Argentina in 2002.