CITY AND SUBURBAN
London gets the Berd, but will it be a thinnifer or a fattifer?
CHRISTOPHER FI LDES
An eminent central banker once ex- plained to me the difference between the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. 'The thing is, Christopher,' he said, 'the Fund are thinnifers and the Bank are fattifers.' Hapless Bank, put on a strict diet only the other day, already expanding again on an afflatus of femin- ism, busily commissioning studies on the role of women in the process of structural adjustment, and yet positively slender and athletic beside such sluggards as Unctad Under No Circumstances Take Any Deci- sion! Now to the ranks of these interna- tional agencies comes the Berd, the Euro- pean Bank (getting its acronym from Ban- que Europeenne) for Reconstruction and Development. A thinnifer Berd, or a fattifer? That will be the test. The pace and commitment which have brought the Berd so far suggest a thinnifer. Six months from the breach in the Berlin Wall, and 40 countries have committed themselves to put up the Berd's capital, and have agreed on its Berd's constitution, on a pecking order of shareholders — the IMF can spend years and years on that — and even on who should head it (President Mitter- and's guru, Jacques Attali) and where it should be (London). If that pace can be sustained, another 12 months should see the Berd up and laying. No one doubts that there is urgent work to be done. What matters is whether the Berd can do it. Other agencies, notably the International Finance Corporation (a World Bank offshoot), are already at work in Eastern Europe. Will weak economies be able to play off one agency against another, as Argentina played off the World Bank against the IMF? Will the new bank have more to contribute than the existing De- velopment Banks for Asia and Africa which would not be saying much? As for the philosophic M. Attali — that wholly unofficial biographer of Sigmund Warburg and author of a history of time, incorporat- ing notions which had previously occurred to Jung, Marx and Voltaire, and notable, as a reviewer complained, for a tragic absence of quotation marks — his presence guarantees that the Berd will be distinc- tive, but not that it will fly.
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