IMF Raises a Bigger Firewall but Hesitates to Use It

Fresh from winning a $430 billion increase in resources to confront any renewed crisis in the euro zone, officials at the International Monetary Fund set to work this week with an overriding objective — making sure they never have to use that money.

这将是一个高大的秩序，由周一的市场运动来判断。欧元和欧洲股市下跌，欧洲政府债券的差价继续在尼古拉斯·萨科齐落后的社会主义竞争对手François·霍兰队在法国总统大选的第一轮投票之后继续进行最近的趋势，因为荷兰政府因预算削减分歧而崩溃后。发展提出了对欧洲紧缩的抵抗力 - 遏制债务危机的第一策略正在增长。

The agreement on new resources reached at the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Washington over the weekend represented a victory of sorts for the Fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde. She had campaigned for the past four months to bolster the so-called financial firewall against any new outbreak of Europe’s debt crisis, and did so in the face of resistance from the U.S. Treasury, which refused to stump up any cash and insisted it was up to the Europeans themselves to bolster their own defenses.

Lagarde had to lower her sights. The total fell short of the $600 billion she initially sought, and it contained relatively little outside money. European Union nations will provide more than half of the funds, some $242 billion. The BRIC nations dragged their feet, promising to chip in about $70 billion collectively in a few months after internal deliberations in their respective capitals. With their show of reticence, Brazil, Russia, India and China made clear they want a bigger say in the Fund and will continue to press for faster changes in IMF quotas and votes before freely opening their wallets. This fall the Fund aims to complete a 2010 reform agreement, which increased modestly the quota and voting rights of emerging markets countries, before embarking on a more ambitious governance overhaul that would require European countries to give up substantial voting rights — and seats on the IMF board — to emerging markets countries.

With some of the new funds earmarked for the IMF’s liquidity reserves, the deal will roughly double the institution’s available lending resources, to around $700 billion. The IMF agreement follows the European Union’s decision last month to increase the size of its two bailout facilities by €200 billion, to a combined €700 billion ($910 billion). So the wherewithal for containing any renewed eruption of the debt crisis seems substantial.

Still, the amounts fall well short of the overwhelming firepower that U.S. officials have long urged the EU to amass. EU authorities and the IMF have already committed more than $500 billion to bailout programs in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. In recent weeks market participants have turned their attention to Spain, where the new government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has admitted the government will overshoot its deficit target for this year. With Spanish bond yields rising almost to 6 percent this week, the government risks the same kind of debt spiral that forced Greece to seek an EU bailout.

The problem, fund officials say privately, is that any intervention in Spain could stretch EU and IMF resources to the limit. Spain’s borrowing needs approach $200 billion a year, and bailout deals so far have provided three years worth of funding. Any Spanish deal, moreover, could easily spark a run on Italian debt.

所有这些都让官员渴望避免新的救助者，绝望地增长以打破欧洲的债务陷阱。Poul Thomsen是一名高级基金官员，帮助设计了欧盟，爱尔兰和葡萄牙的欧盟 - 国际货币基金组织救助计划，在周末国际货币基金组织研讨会上承认，所有三个国家都面临着重组其经济体并恢复增长的巨大挑战。“如果这些计划只会成为财政整合和财务折叠，他们将明显失败，”他说。

然而，欧洲没有快速修复跳跃的增长。德国，唯一可以想象作为经济机车的国家拒绝任何刺激措施。危机国家正在追求竞争力和恢复增长的劳动和产品市场改革将需要数年时间来偿还。Portugal, for instance, is likely to need a second EU-IMF bailout by September because budget cuts are deepening the country’s recession while structural reforms aimed at boosting growth will take years to pay off, according to a report last week by Daniele Antonucci and Paolo Batori, analysts at Morgan Stanley in London.

For anyone hoping Europe’s debt crisis had abated, Natacha Valla, chief economist at Goldman Sachs France, offered a sobering forecast at a seminar sponsored by the Banque de France in New York on Monday. Valla said that concerns about European debt sustainability and the health of banks that hold big chunks of that debt would persist for years, and that markets are likely to be roiled by repeated waves of risk aversion.

With the risks of multiple storms ahead, EU and IMF policymakers have ample reason to want to keep their powder dry.