PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday there was a “complete consensus” at a summit of world leaders in Paris to reform global financial bodies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Summing up a meeting of around 40 heads of state and government, Macron said the consensus was to make them “more efficient, fairer and better suited to the world of today.”
France had billed the two-day Summit for a New Global Financing Pact as an opportunity to discuss ideas ahead of a cluster of major economic and climate meetings this year.
Other world leaders also lent their support to the idea of reforming the World Bank and IMF, the so-called Bretton Woods institutions formed after World War II which are dominated by the West.
“We need to say that very clearly: the World Bank is not meeting the world’s expectations and we need to say this,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told a closing session of the summit. “The IMF is not meeting the world’s expectations.”
He said the IMF had “very irresponsibly made Argentina a huge loan and we dont know what the Argentinian president did with that money and today Argentina is in the very different situation because it doesn’t have enough dollars to pay back the IMF.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also backed reforms to “how these banks are managed and the framework for their activities.”
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