The International Monetary Fund said on Friday that it had overhauled its lending rules for heavily indebted countries including a rule created in 2010 to allow it to aid Greece.
Last week, the IMF abandoned the “systemic exemption” rule which it used to justify giving Greece a massive bailout despite doubts about the sustainability of the country’s sovereign debt.
At the time, the crisis lender decided that a Greek debt restructuring could pose severe negative spillovers on the rest of the eurozone, thus the need for the exemption.
In a report published on Friday, the IMF acknowledged that this controversial rule “did not prove reliable in mitigating contagion” and posed “substantial” costs and risks for the IMF and member countries.
In addition, it could encourage creditors to overlend to a country on easier terms because they believe the country would likely receive a public bailout in a crisis, it said.
The measure had stirred criticism, notably from some emerging-market countries that saw it as giving favorable treatment to European states, but it was also under fire from US Republican lawmakers who called for its end. The new rules drop that exemption and focus on a “gray” zone in which a country’s debt has not been deemed sustainable with “high probability” – one of the IMF’s core lending rules – and restructuring of its sovereign debt is considered too risky.
