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When Jamaica signed its final IMF programme in 2013, many of the Fund’s workers had been so positive it might fail it that they typically opened inside follow-up conferences with a sardonic joke: “Has Jamaica crashed yet?”.
Scepticism was comprehensible. Jamaica had by then spent most of its time as an impartial nation in some type of IMF programme. Its financial system had been stagnant for many years, and authorities money owed reached a frankly silly 144 per cent.
Some thought that Jamaica’s sixteenth IMF programme was merely a cynical ploy to maintain the present on the highway lengthy sufficient for the Fund to extract extra of its assets already tied up within the nation from previous failed programmes.
A decade later, Jamaica is taking over the IMF (kinda).
Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the Worldwide Financial Fund (IMF), introduced right this moment to the Government Board her proposal to nominate Mr. Nigel Clarke to the place of Deputy Managing Director, efficient October 31, 2024. He’ll succeed Ms. Antoinette Sayeh, who, as previously announced, steps down on September 12.
In asserting her collection of Mr. Clarke, Ms. Georgieva stated:
“Mr. Clarke is an distinctive public servant and policymaker, with confirmed management in establishment constructing and financial disaster administration, who has stewarded his nation’s financial system to a stronger and extra sustainable place.
Since 2016, he has been the IMF’s chief counterpart on successive and traditionally profitable applications for Jamaica, together with an Prolonged Fund Facility, a precautionary Stand-By Association, and most not too long ago a Precautionary Liquidity Line plus Resilience and Sustainability Facility, leaving the nation with sturdy financial fundamentals. Nigel additionally brings a wealth of expertise from a stellar personal sector profession.”
It’s tempting to joke that that is one other instance of Authorities Sachs, since Clarke began his profession as an fairness derivatives dealer on the funding financial institution’s London workplace. However clearly, it’s as Jamaica’s finance minister since 2018 that Clarke has made his mark.
Jamaica’s path from butt of jokes to IMF darling was began by his predecessor Peter Phillips, of the opposition Folks’s Nationwide Occasion. It was Phillips who shepherded the nation by means of the primary grim years of the 2013 programme. He deserves credit score for taking up what was undoubtedly a crap job at a crap time and doing it extremely effectively. Maybe many of the credit score.
However after the Jamaica Labour Occasion received the 2016 election, Clarke did greater than merely proceed on the identical path. Because the IMF stated in its assertion:
. . . He spearheaded bold nationwide reforms, together with central financial institution independence, creation of an impartial fiscal fee, in addition to different tax coverage, public physique governance, public procurement, public sector compensation, and public funding administration reforms.
He additionally led Jamaica’s financial coverage response to the COVID-19 pandemic with modern and well-targeted coverage help and accomplished privatizations and public-private partnerships of main infrastructure belongings.
Below his stewardship, Jamaica carried out a multi-layered catastrophe danger financing mannequin, and have become the primary small nation to independently sponsor a disaster bond, with World Financial institution help. In 2023, Jamaica efficiently accomplished its first ever worldwide difficulty of a neighborhood foreign money denominated bond.
Clarke can be very a lot the IMF kind: a clean, cerebral and technocratic Rhodes scholar with a PhD from Oxford. Nonetheless, first-hand expertise as finance minister of a programme nation is clearly why he bought the gig of deputy MD.
Naturally, Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness is claiming it as a giant win for his administration, the nation, and the Caribbean. Which is truthful sufficient, as a result of not way back the suggestion {that a} former Jamaican finance minister would maintain one of many prime IMF jobs would have seen you laughed out of 700 nineteenth Road.
FTAV as soon as joked that perhaps Jamaica ought to ship a few of its officers to DC to type shit out. With lots of different massive IMF programmes already an unholy mess, seemingly doomed to failure, or a minimum of wanting pretty dicey, it appears the Fund itself would possibly agree.
Additional studying:
— Inside the IMF’s outrageous, improbably successful Jamaican programme (Pt. 1)
— Inside the IMF’s outrageous, improbably successful Jamaican programme (Pt. 2)
— The Jamaican exception (FTAV)
