the resign of Sa'ad Ali Shire

[bashe19]

[bashe19]

On Lebanon, I'd say that as you may have seen the international support group led by France and the UN met on Wednesday of this week to consider measures to help Lebanon. We support the position of the international support group for the urgent formation of a new government to immediately implement a comprehensive and credible plan to restore economic stability. And on the IMF part, we are open to supporting the authorities with technical advice as desired by Lebanon.

There is a question on Somalia. Will the IMF board meet to discuss Somalia's debt relief and when is the board date? We are working with our members to secure the financial resources necessary to clear the arrears to the IMF currently owed by Somalia. And importantly to cover the costs of debt relief.

And I can tell you that the board will meet on this issue on December 18th, to agree on how to finance the Fund's contribution to debt relief for Somalia. This has been a priority issue for us in terms of trying to help Somalia. And this board meeting next week on this issue is an important step forward.

There is a question about Pakistan. Where do we stand now with Pakistan, what's the status of the IMF program, is Pakistan doing the necessary reforms and so on.

The IMF has a $6 billion program to support IMF's economic reforms. We had a mission there in November and the communication around that with a preliminary assessment of where we think Pakistan stands. Which is that the program is on track and we reached a staff-level agreement on what we call the first review. You can read about that in more detail on our website.

We had the preliminary assessment from staff after that mission to Pakistan and the board will meet to discuss that first review on Thursday, December 19th. What that indicates is that all prior actions and performance criteria under the program with Pakistan have been met. And that the financing assurances needed for the program to go forward are in place. There's a question on the European Central Bank, which met this morning and had a press conference and were asked for the IMF response to the ECB's decision today. To which I would say that the IMF staff firmly supports maintaining strong monetary accommodation until the EBC's medium term inflation objective is met. So, I think characterizes as firmly supportive of the ECB decision today.

There's a question that has just come in. Could you give us a sense of the way the global economy is doing during the last quarter of 2019?

I don’t really have an update on that beyond what we've been saying recently. And the Managing Director has been out in public, including over the last few days talking about the global economy. We have characterized it as a synchronized slowdown. Countries representing 90 percent of global GDP in a slowdown, we talked about that quite a bit at the annual meetings. The global economy is growing, but it's growing more slowly. And we will have an update on that with fresh numbers and a fresh forecast in about a months' time, when we release the WEO update.

I want to thank you very much for your courtesy, your patience, and your good questions. And this will be the last press briefing of 2019 and I thank you for all your work and working with us in 2019 and really look forward to working with you all in 2020. So, happy New Year when it comes.

IMF Communications Department

[LeJusticier]

Caawa forumerskii nacas aan caadi ahayn bay soo cabeen.
One has posted video that has nothing to do sacad ali shire, another one posted Lebanon.

[Nubis]

^Lol.