Former Bank of California managing director and shareholder Frank Adu Jr. has predicted that Ghana will return to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for another bailout after its current $3 billion program with the fund. .
He blamed the failure on leaders’ refusal to put national interests ahead of personal political ambitions in decision-making.
In an interview with TV3’s Pa Kwesi Asare on Business Focus on Monday, February 19, Frank Adu Jr. said: In his third or fourth year in power, elections at all costs are bound to damage the economy.
“You will not be participating in this domestic debt exchange program and will be left with the T-Bills that you are using to pay the DDEP coupons. Issuing T-Bills” percent. At that point, for example, they could have artificially lowered interest rates, reset them, and let the market do its thing again. ”
We had been to the IMF 17 times and we said we would never go again, he was asked what we thought about this.
In response he said: “We’ll go again. We’re not serious, so I’m being realistic. Under this particular kind of democracy that we practice, we’re not going anywhere. As a country. I think the situation we’re in right now is a very difficult one. It takes a lot of self-reflection to get out of it. We’re dealing with people’s lives, so we don’t want to deal with hype or politics. We need to stop generalizing. One of the problems we have is that once politicians are in power, they forget that they now have the power to govern and continue to govern. And that’s one of the issues that’s causing us economic hardship. It’s all a political decision.”
She added: “I worry about the unemployed young people. I worry about what they will do for us if we don’t find something to do with their lives.” ” he added.
Regarding DDEP, he said the compassionate approach taken by the government was to exclude prisoners from the program.
Frank said DDEP has blown away all the known financial difficulties of creating a pension plan.
It will be recalled that pensioners picketed the Treasury in protest against participation in this program. Dr. Adu Anan Antwi, a pensioner leader and former executive director of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said pensioners fought for issuer exemption rather than self-exemption.
He said the two are completely different. “If you don’t understand the issue between self-exemption and publisher exemption, you won’t understand what we’re doing,” he said on TV3’s Ghana Tonight program on Wednesday, February 15.
He added, “No one fights for self-exemption. We are fighting for issuer immunity, but we haven’t gotten it yet. These are technicalities, so let’s not analyze them. Even the stockbrokers don’t know. We want to maintain our issuer exempt status.”
They then ended the demonstration. Dr. Adu Anane Antwi said, “We went to the Ministry of Finance today to express our gratitude.” [Ofori-Atta, the then Finance Minister] There was no arguing that they had granted our request. The picketing is over because I got what I wanted. ”
Frank Adu Jr. “The government missed an opportunity when it was implementing this unfortunate DDEP. When the DDEP comes into force, the Ministry of Finance and the central bank will reset this for each institution. , we need to issue treasury bills, we reset 15 percent in fiat currency, and I should have done that.This was an irregular idea, but because the country was solving its problems. , I think the market would have supported it. This DDEP basically blew away all the financial theory we know about how to plan pensions. My first thought was that my colleague Pensioners are buying bonds, how will they survive?
“That’s why there was so much agitation. I think the government should have excluded even Eurobonds from pensioners when they announced it. Because there are very few people over the age of 60 who hold municipal bonds or euro bonds, a compassionate approach would have been to isolate and even eliminate them.”