Japan is set to propose to the world’s leading industrialized nations that a joint fund be set up to give emergency loans to nations hit by the growing financial crisis, the finance minister said yesterday.
Japanese Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said he is set to make the proposal at the G7 meeting of finance and central bank officials that he is attending in Washington.
“Japan would like to see what it can do to work with other countries to ensure ample capital supply,” he said on nationally televised NHK news.
He did not give details of the plan. But he said Japan’s experience in dealing with its bad debt crisis in the 1990s may offer lessons for the other G7 nations.
He said he hopes to tell others how Japan injected public money into banks at that time to bolster their capital after the so-called bubble economy of soaring land and stock prices burst and banks got stuck with loads of bad debt.
In Iceland, the government now has control of all three of the country’s major banks.
Japan’s proposal will call for a cooperative scheme through the IMF to dole out emergency lending to nations whose financial systems run out of cash, the Nikkei Shimbun reported yesterday.
China and Middle Eastern nations will also be asked to contribute money to the fund in an effort to prevent the further spread of the global fallout from the US subprime credit crisis, the paper reported.
IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Thursday that the IMF has reactivated an emergency aid process for countries seeking help in the global financial crisis.
“I have yesterday [Wednesday] activated emergency procedures of the IMF to respond quickly with high-access financial programs based on streamlined conditionality which is focused on the crisis-response priority,” Strauss-Kahn said at a news conference in Washington.
The emergency procedure, developed in 1995, allows up-front payments from the IMF under streamlined conditionality. Strauss-Kahn said the IMF had sufficient resources to support the needs of its 185 members.
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