5. You can earn interest ob a current account.
6. Banks lend money to depositors who need capital.
7. The main profits of a bank come from lending money at a fixed rate of
interest.
8. Money is described as “liquid” because it is compared to flowing water.
9. Legal tender must change hands when we do business and we must see
it change hands.
UNIT 8
World Bank
The
World
Bank
is
the
world's
foremost
intergovernmental organization concerned with the external financing of
the economic growth of developing countries.
The official title of the
institution is the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development
(IBRD). Before recommending a Bank loan, the staff of the Bank must be
reasonably satisfied that the productivity of the borrowing country will be
increased and that the prospects for repayment are good. A country
must be judged creditworthy.
Engineering
investigations
are
frequently earned out to determine the probable
relation of a proposed
project to benefits and costs. Increasingly, however, the Bank has shifted
somewhat away from project lending (e.g., for a dam or a highway or a
port); it has become concerned with education
and other human services,
the environment, and, through structural adjustment loans, the modification
of governmental policies that are thought to have impeded long-run
growth. The Bank has also paid increasing attention to the evaluation of
previous lending. Recently, moreover, it has acceded to the requests of the
American secretary of the treasury to help to ease the huge, outstanding»
largely commercial-bank debt.
Voting power in the Bank (as well as in the Fund), is determined by the
size of each member nation's subscription. Subscriptions,
in turn are based
on a formula that takes into account such variables as the value of each
nation's foreign
trade and its total output. Ultimate power, through weighted voting, rests
with the Board of Governors of the Bank (and the Fund). The
governors
meet annually in September. The day-to-day
affairs of the Bank are
etermined, however, by executive directors who live permanently
'п
as ington, D.C. They hire a president, who, in turn, hires a staff. By
m
tradition, rather than law, the president of the Bank is an American, usually
a banker, proposed by the President of the United States.
Because of the
size of their subscriptions, five nations— the United
States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France—are entitled to
appoint executive directors; the remaining seventeen directors are elected
by some combination of the votes of the other nations. There are 156
member nations, but, with the independence of
the Baltic states and the
devolution of the Soviet Union into separate republics, the membership
could increase to over 170, thereby including all the independent nations in
the world.
The Soviet Union was one of the forty-four governments whose
representatives signed the original Bretton Woods agreements, but along
with the other members of the Warsaw Pact, it chose not to join
the Bank
or the Fund when these organizations were formally incorporated in 1946.
(Poland and Czechoslovakia joined the Bank and the Fund initially but
withdrew when the cold war began in earnest and a loan to Poland was
blocked by the United States.
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