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To: accountclosed who wrote (20653)	2/20/1999 12:01:00 PM
From: Lucretius	Respond to of 86076

Saturday February 20, 8:16 am Eastern Time G7 aims for new debt relief deal for poor nations By Ashley Seager BONN, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Finance ministers from the Group of Seven industrial nations will later on Saturday make their strongest commitment yet to improving debt relief for the world's poorest countries, G7 officials said. They said the aim was to complete a deal in time for the June G7 summit in Cologne. Ministers from several of the G7 members -- the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan -- put forward ideas at Saturday's meeting to speed up the so-called Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. ''The communique will contain the strongest support yet for improving debt relief. I'm confident we will have done a deal by the Cologne summit in June,'' one official said. The HIPC scheme was launched in 1996 under the umbrella of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Paris Club of government creditors. It dangled the carrot of the most generous debt relief terms yet offered by the international community to deeply indebted governments that show they can knuckle down to economic reform. But only a handful of countries have so far qualified for HIPC relief and a political consensus is forming that ways must be found to speed up implementation of the scheme. -- Germany, converted under new centre-left Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to the principle of more generous debt relief, wants to shorten the six-year policy track record that countries must establish before they qualify. -- The United States wants to sell some of the International Monetary Fund's gold reserves to pay for extra write-offs. -- Britain favours easing the criteria for debt relief. ''We want by the end of the year 2000 to have all highly indebted poor countries on a systematic programme of debt reduction,'' Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown told reporters on Friday. -- France wants the scheme to cover a greater proportion of debt and proposes increasing the maximum write-off from the current level of 80 percent. The Bundesbank, Germany's influential central bank, has in the past fiercely opposed IMF gold sales, fearing it would set a precedent for the Bonn government to stake a claim to some of its own gold reserves. But a second G7 official said she detected a softening in the Bundesbank's opposition. ''There's now a lot more common ground between us,'' she said. Aid campaigners point to Mozambique to illustrate the inadequacy of existing debt relief efforts. Mozambique's HIPC deal reduced its annual debt servicing bill by just $13 million a year, to $100 million, because it had already stopped paying interest on the debts written off. As a result the savings it made were worth just 80 cents a year for every Mozambican and the government is still having to spend more on debt servicing than it does on education. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: accountclosed who wrote (20653)	2/20/1999 12:03:00 PM
From: Lucretius	Respond to of 86076

Saturday February 20, 10:59 am Eastern Time FOCUS-G7 adopts action plan to monitor markets (Adds agreement on Tietmeyer report) By Merissa Marr BONN, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Finance ministers from the Group of Seven industrialised nations on Saturday instructed global financial regulators to cooperate more closely to head off the sort of market turmoil that is hobbling world economic growth. The G7 ministers endorsed a report by German Bundesbank President Hans Tietmeyer recommending the creation of a new ''financial stability forum'' to prevent a repeat of the crises that have shaken Asia, Russia and Brazil in the past two years. "Ultimately the process of strengthening cooperation should make a significant contribution to a better functioning of the financial markets. ''This will make possible a full utilisation of the considerable benefits which free capital movements provide to all participants in the global financial system,'' the head of Germany's influential central bank said. Tietmeyer was asked to come up with ideas for keeping a closer eye on flows of footloose capital after world markets slumped following Russia's de-facto default on its foreign debt last summer. He said the forum, made up of officials from existing international bodies, would convene at least twice a year but ruled out sweeping changes to the way the global financial system is supervised. ''Instead, a process...should be set in motion to ensure that national and international authorities and groupings can coordinate efforts to promote the stability of the international financial system and to improve the functioning of the markets in order to reduce systemic risk,'' Tietmeyer said. The state of the world economy was the other main item on the agenda of the day-long talks, which officials called friendly and constructive. U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was expected to press Europe and Japan to redouble their efforts to boost domestic demand to suck in more goods from developing countries desperate to export their way back to economic health. Rubin has said the United States cannot continue indefinitely as the consumer of last resort for the world economy without stoking protectionist pressure at home and building up a dangerously large trade deficit. Figures released on Friday showed the U.S. trade deficit jumped 53 percent in 1998 to a record $169 billion and economists expect the gap to widen further this year. In Europe, by contrast, German output shrank 0.4 percent in the final quarter of 1998 and French industrial production fell 1.6 percent in December, showed data issued on Friday. Economists said the weakness would keep the spotlight on the European Central Bank, which this week defied Franco-German pressure for interest rate cuts saying it saw little evidence that the industrial slowdown would hit strong consumer spending. The euro, launched with great fanfare on January 1, sank to a new low on Friday of $1.1060, but European Monetary Affairs Commssioner Yves-Thibault de Silguy said he was confident about both the fledgling currency and Europe's growth prospects. ''The euro is not too weak, and there are no grounds for pessimism about the European Union's economic situation,'' de Silguy told Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper. Japanese Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa was also expected to sound a note of cautious optimism that huge deficit spending by the government and short-term interest rates close to zero were finally having an effect on the Japanese economy, which is mired in its deepest recession since World War Two. ''Japan... is crawling along the bottom but it is no longer deteriorating rapidly,'' an official said. Officials said the Seven -- the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Canada -- also reviewed plans to speed up debt relief for serving poor countries with the aim of sealing a deal in time for June's G7 summit in the German city of Cologne. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: accountclosed who wrote (20653)	2/20/1999 12:38:00 PM
From: John Pitera	Respond to of 86076

AR, The EFH has lost most of the intellectual clout it had in the fianance market place of ideas when it came out in the early 1970's The fact is that market information is not readily available to all at the same time witness the big flurry of call buying that precedes most takeovers. Also, the blatant insider selling that occurs before a company blows up.....I still remember CTXS in early 1997 the insiders sold like crazy...six weeks later MSFT terminates talks with them concerning the CTXS thin-client software that they had been licensing, and MSFT says it will build its own competing product. When News is public and a 55 $ stock which had headed to the mid 30's goes to 10 in a gap down that day..(Charts will look different now due to splits) Market participants are not all equally savvy about what to do with info they get. Some of the people buying the net bubbles, Y2K bubbles (ZITL) in 1996-97, Radio stocks in the late 1920's...etc. all valid examples. I am in the camp that Fear/Greed is a cornerstone duality that human civilization is built upon..... and these basic core emotions are played out in the markets every week Indexing in itself has created the biggest valuation disparity between the big Caps and the Small Caps since the early 1970's with the nifty 50 ....I have right here SRC Green Book of 35 year stock charts that I bought in 1986 so the charts are from 1951 to 1986 and the declines in the AVP, prd, Ko, xrx's of the bearmarket of 73-74 (some stocks topped before then) are almost unbelievable.. Talk about market efficiency ....I think the drillers are a good example where people fell in love with them and loved the valuations on the way down. check out Fen, and coho ....both went from like 40 to under a buck in less than 18 months. anyway...EMH is a Myth