Poorer than thou
Two of Tom Clausen's favoured plans will be on the table this weekend. The first is the insurance scheme to encourage the flow of investment to needy countries by offering cover against political risks of which nationalisation could be the least. This plan, called Miga (Multilateral Invest- ment Guarantee Agency), has a twin called Myra, which is Multi-Year Rescheduling Agreement, or taking to time to pay. Mr Clausen also wants to set up a special Fund for Africa, where the most intractable problem countries are. That plan will cut across the requests from the Latin Amer- ican debtor countries for a special encoun- ter of their own with the seven industrial countries which now stage economic sum- mits. The summiteers hope to divert this into a special meeting of the IMF's De- velopment Committee, and they hope, in engineering this diversion, to get help from the worst-off countries. Why, such coun- tries may say, should the improvident debtors have special treatment, when we are too poor to have debt problems, because not even the haziest bank would have lent us any money in the first place? In this game, there is much curiosity about the Argentines, and how they will choose to play their misere hand. One theory is that they will try to embarrass President Reagan on to their side — bail us out, they might say, or we shall renege on the US banks and bust them, which will not help you become re-elected.
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