Following the hard-biting economic turmoil, the United Nations have put together a special economic task force and Nigeria’s Central Bank Governor, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, has been appointed to join the team, reports claim.
The team will be headed by Joseph Stiglitz, a former Chief Economist at the World Bank and winner of Nobel Prize for Economics, will chair the team. As spelled out by the United Nations General Assembly president, Miguel Descotoas, the Commission of the International Monetary and Financial System experts will assemble to examine the possible reform of the global financial system, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
The panel of experts other than Soludo include a Malaysian, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, the Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), and a former lecturer with Univesiti Malaya and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and Jose Antonio Ocampo of Colombia, a former Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs.
Also in the panel are Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Professor of Economics at the Institute d’Etudes Politiques de Paris in France, Avinash Persaud of Barbados, who is Chairman of Intelligence Capital Ltd and Yaga Venugopal Reddy, former governor of India’s Reserve Bank. Japan’s Eisuke Sakakibara, who once was dubbed “Mr Yen”, and now Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo is also in the panel, along with China’s Yu Yongding, the Director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics.
Soludo who became Nigeria’s Central Bank governor in 2004 was drafted into the team following his remarkable economics. Months after getting into office Soludo had initiated the banking consolidation exercise, which reduced the number of banks in Nigeria from 89 to 24. The market-induced consolidation exercise, which raised the shareholders’ funds in banks in Nigeria from N2 billion to N25 billion, has helped save Nigerian banks from the global financial crises that have seen the United States and the European governments pump several billions of dollars into their economy to bail out their respective financial institutions.
United Nations General Assembly president, Miguel Descotoas said ‘The task force will suggest steps that member states can take to secure a more stable global economic order.
Many economies are either already in recession or slipping into recession as a result of the financial crisis brought on by the credit crisis in the United States. There is growing recognition that the current turmoil in the financial system cannot be solved through piecemeal responses at the national and regional levels but require a coordinated effort at the global level.’
