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Good morning. We completed our meeting of G7 Finance Ministers last night, and you’ve seen the communiqué which accurately describes our view of global economic growth. I enjoyed the time we spent together yesterday afternoon and evening. We made progress on several areas of joint concern, specifically in advancing a new structure for preventing and resolving sovereign debt crises, combating terrorist financing, and ensuring that development assistance achieves real, measurable results.
We are advancing all four elements of the G7 April Action Plan on crisis prevention and resolution. It’s clear that a country’s own policies determine its economic destiny. When a nation’s leaders permit the build up of an unsustainable debt burden, the citizens of that nation pay the price for the failure of leadership. The lack of any predictable process for resolving debt crises exacerbates the depth and duration of the difficulties. We must explore every possible option to improve the current system so that nations can resolve debt crises and return to growth.
I’m pleased that the IMF and World Bank will begin assessing member nations’ compliance with the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) anti-money laundering and terrorist financing recommendations. And I look forward to all these institutions working together to provide nations with the technical assistance they need to safeguard their formal and informal financial system from abuse by terrorists.
The United States will fulfill its commitment to HIPC debt relief, including through contributions to the HIPC Trust Fund, but debt relief alone is no guarantor of future success. HIPC nations need to create an economic foundation for job creation and rising incomes, and the donor community, including the IMF and World Bank, need to work with them to avoid excessive borrowing that will create a future unsustainable debt burden. We must encourage leaders to create the conditions for growth. Reinforcing good policies and insisting that grants and other resources achieve real measurable results, are crucial to ensuring that HIPC is not temporary relief but an ingredient in permanent success.
I am particularly pleased that my G7 colleagues joined me in calling on all international donors to meet their commitments to reconstruction in Afghanistan. Transforming Afghanistan into a modern state with the necessary institutions of government and society is one of the largest leadership challenges of our time. Uncertainty about resources only further complicates the incredibly difficult challenge facing the transitional government.