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| Moreno: IDB needs to contiuously adapt |
LUIS ALBERTO MORENO has tough challenges ahead of him. For a start, the new president of the Inter-American Development Bank is following in the footsteps of Enrique Iglesias, a genial Uruguayan who has dominated the institution for the past 17 years. But more than that the former Colombian ambassador to the US, who took over at the IDB last month, has the task of maintaining the bank’s relevance. This will not be easy. There is still uncertainty about what role the bank should play in financing a region that is arguably more volatile than any other. Some market players, especially in the private sector, think it should be minimal, as they view the multilateral as at best an irrelevance and at worst a hindrance.
One fund manager in London, for example, says the best thing would be “to close [the IDB] down”. He asks: “What does it do? What’s the justification for it? Development banks have outlived their usefulness. Let the market allocate capital rather than the bureaucrats.”
Michael Gavin, head of Latin American research at UBS, takes a more sympathetic line.