The International Monetary Fund will push to overhaul global monetary and financial systems in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, managing director Michel Camdessus said yesterday.
Mr Camdessus, speaking on the eve of the IMF's Interim Committee meeting, said the Asian crisis had highlighted the 'obvious weaknesses' in the present global structure.
'We are aiming to re-invent the architecture of the international monetary and financial system,' he said.
'We want to have a system established on a rock-solid basis. We are between ambition and the too-modest achievements of our work.' Earlier this week, the IMF said the Asian crisis had resulted in it having to downgrade for the second time in four months its forecast for this year's world growth to just over 3 per cent.
'The Asian crisis, coming in the footsteps of the Mexican one, has given full flow to what is the most obvious weakness of the present system,' Mr Camdessus said.
'It is [the system's] vulnerability to crisis, the speed to contagion, the centrality of each crisis, of the problems emerging in the banking and financial sector as well as instances of [weak] governance.' He said the poor in the countries hardest hit had shouldered a disproportionate share of the cost of the economic meltdown.
Mr Camdessus said the problems should not allow governments to lose sight of the 'extraordinary' potential of a fully integrated global market.
