Less than 24 hours after the International Monetary Fund closed its four-day meeting in Washington the president himself told Newsmax Monday night that he would soon reveal his policy toward the financial colossus.
Although he offered no details, Mr. Trump nonetheless signaled — in announcing his IMF policy sooner rather than later — that he would most likely support keeping the current level of U.S. financial support for the IMF rather than ask Congress to rescind it.
“We’ll have something on the IMF in a few days,” Trump said in response to a question from Newsmax, strongly hinting that he was aware of the questions about what the policy of the fund’s largest shareholder would be under its new president.
The president spoke to us at a private meeting for conservative journalists in the West Wing of the White House.
Trump also made it clear he was sympathetic to the plight of Greece, now in its eighth year of grappling with a debt that is now at 323 billion euros. Along with the European Central Bank and Eurogroup (the 19 members of the Eurozone that exercise control over the Euro currency), the IMF is one of the members of the troika — the three creditors who provided loans to keep the Greek economy afloat since 2010.
“Greece!” Trump exclaimed to us, “They are in such a terrible situation there. It’s awful. Are you Greek?”
Trump’s statements came one month after he dealt a jolt to IMF supporters by naming David Malpass, a longtime critic of the fund, as the top U.S. Treasury official overseeing international finance. He subsequently named another IMF skeptic, former investment banker and American Enterprise Institute Visiting Scholar Adam Lerrick, as deputy to Malpass.
During the recent IMF/World Bank spring meeting in Washington, participants made it clear they had a nervous apprehension about how they would be treated by the Trump administration.
“It is important that the IMF and the creditors reach an honorable compromise ensuring the sustainability of the Greek debt,” Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos told me. “We are waiting to see what the new administration in the U.S. thinks. We don’t want this to drag on.”
