Global financial crisis hits I.D.B. at 1.9 billion dollars

In other economic news, the global crisis is affecting all financial sectors and reports in the international media are that it has hit home with the Inter-American Development Bank. Internal documents reveal that in 2008, the institution’s investment portfolio lost an estimated one point nine billion dollars. The losses are estimated to be ten to a hundred times higher than that of other development banks and are being blamed on risky investment activities undertaken in recent years. The situation was so startling that it prompted Republican Leader on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, to write a letter to the Bank’s President Luis Alberto Moreno asking for an explanation. The U.S. is the single largest shareholder in the IDB with thirty percent, while twenty-six Latin American and Caribbean countries hold fifty percent of the voting power. Bank officials have maintained that the losses have not affected the institution’s lending capacity or solvency and in 2008 they issued eleven point one billion dollars in loans. The IDB is the major financier to Latin American and Caribbean countries, proving more loans than any other government-owned regional financial institution. Late last year the government of Belize announced a twenty-six million dollar loan from the IDB for a sustainable tourism project and this year the PM publicized that another ten million dollars will be coming from the agency for infrastructure rehabilitation on the Western Highway.