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Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to tell because the World Bank is so young in the history of nations. Certainly in the short term things are less painful, but having your country's natural wealth siphoned off by other countries (or in many cases absurdly wealthy individuals/companies) has the potential to create real and systematic harms.

We could imagine, for example, a United States that became and remained very poor after having all its natural wealth siphoned off by European firms under predatory terms during the Great Depression. It's hard to tell if the world would've been a better or worse place (maybe the profits would've been reinvested into stabilizing Germany's internal politics), but certainly US citizens would be much worse off today.

On the other hand, could a World Bank have saved Germany from Nazism and ended the world wars after episode I? Probably. Who really knows.

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This is a good point. In general, predatory lending has been a favorite tool of imperialism, and it continues to sort of be that way even though you don't see explicit imperialism anymore.

The crux of the problem is that non-developed nations still have something that developed countries want: either natural resources, or human resources. The IMF is basically a modern version of the Paris Club, and is a tool used to make it cheap and easy to extract these resources/make them available to the global economy, without the explicit threat of military invasion.

I don't really see a good solution for "Poor" countries. You can't have people dependent forever on foreign aid. But perhaps the developed part of the world becomes so productive that at least the necessities for productive lives, such as basic education and healthcare, can be provided to "poor" nations. This is what I view the Gates foundational work as doing.

It is in the interests of the global community to have stable and safe economies all around the globe. I really hope we can reach that goal sometime in my lifetime....

"Predatory" lending is only possible in the presence of coercion.

If Party A is such a bad credit risk that the only loan they can get is from Party B at a high interest rate, and that requires them to dramatically change the behavior that created the cash crisis in the first place, Party B is not a predator.

If Party B is charging too much for the loan, surely another "greedy" party will undercut them and offer better terms to Party A.

If Party A accepts the debt on the same conditions, but then fails to dramatically change their behavior such that they insist the terms of the original deal be modified or else they'll default, Party A is acting like the predator.

In the case of the World Bank this is not a compelling argument.

Both critics and advocates claim that WB does not exist in a vacuum -- it is part of the larger post-WW2 western world order. Critics claim the coercion happens decades before WB offers the loan.

> "Predatory" lending is only possible in the presence of coercion.

Most certainly not true. It can also be caused by lack options, or awareness of options.

e.g. The US overwhelmingly opposed the creation Asian Development Bank, funded by China, precisely because of the leverage that it would lose over the ability to make loans through a proxy (World Bank) and dictate strict conditions around those loans.

> If Party B is charging too much for the loan, surely another "greedy" party will undercut them and offer better terms to Party A.

You are assuming perfect competition in the area of loans to nation-states: this is certainly not the case. There are only a handful of lenders playing at this level, and they are mostly driven by politics, not profit.

"Only a handful of lenders playing at this level"

There are many lenders playing at "this level," presuming that by "this level" you're referring to the market for sovereign debt.

The area where there are only a handful of "players" is lending to countries that are very high credit risks. And for good reason. What rational investor would lend money to a party clearly unable to pay it back? None. That's a death wish.

Except of course when governments guarantee that party's credit for political reasons. Usually the arguments for such "support" include precepts that the free market leaves some nations behind, and so intervention is justified.

But the intervention, as we have seen quite often with the IMF itself, can do more harm than good.

And by the way, many "undeveloped" countries have respectable credit ratings (http://www.oecd.org/trade/xcred/cre-crc-current-english.pdf).

The tone of your comment suggests disagreement, but the meat of it is in full agreement with my earlier comment, so much so that yours can be thought of as a more fleshed-out version of mine.

>> There are only a handful of lenders playing at this level...

> The area where there are only a handful of "players" is lending to countries that are very high credit risks. And for good reason. What rational investor would lend money to a party clearly unable to pay it back? None. That's a death wish...

>> ...and they are mostly driven by politics, not profit.

> Except of course when governments guarantee that party's credit for political reasons

Your reference to lenders began with: "You are assuming perfect competition in the area of loans to nation-states," and you said "there are only a handful of lenders playing at this level." I disagreed because this is untrue, and suggested your comment may only be accurate in reference to countries representing very high credit risks.

Regarding politics and profit, we disagree here as well. Yes, I referenced political reasons as motives for lending to these very high credit risk countries, but it's not mutually exclusive. I believe if you dig into that political motive you will find a strong profit motive. Maybe the "State" isn't motivated by profit, but often the people who exert power over the State are. What else would they be motivated by? Doing good for humanity? Please...

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