‘Let the banks finance production to create wealth’: Petro

This Friday, in Cartagena, the closing act of the Banking Convention takes place, with the presence of the president, Gustavo Petro, and the president of Asobancaria, Hernando José Gómez, the guild of financial institutions in the country.

(The four sustainable strategies of banking).

The event started with an intervention by Gómez, who pointed out that Asobancaria, in the last two years, disbursed “860 billion pesos in loans for families and companies and, in the last decade, we increased the indicator of financial deepening as a percentage of GDP by 16 points”.

He also highlighted that, since 2018, “financial institutions have invested around 1 billion pesos in innovation, giving way to more than 470 incremental and disruptive innovations.”

The president of Asobancaria assured: “We are a solid, innovative, dynamic and purposeful bank. Our nature is commitment to Colombia. We are playing with the country.”

For his part, in his speech, Petro assured: “We are not proposing that the financial sector of a country be eliminated, but how it can serve in the generation of wealth and its democratization.”

The president said that “banking is not a generator of wealth in itself, it can transfer it, but it is production that generates it.” And that, in that sense, “The financial proposal is that the banks finance production to create wealth.”

For the president, “financing production is equivalent to democratizing access to credit.” Along these lines, he also spoke of ‘drop by drop’, and pointed out: “What the appearance of drop by drop implies is an inability of the financial sector to touch the popular economy and the peasant economy, which shows a way forward, for build up”.

Petro also spoke of “the transfer of wealth through the financial sector to production.” He explained: “That is, that the Colombian economy be more egalitarian.”

In addition, the President of the Republic, Gustavo Petro, at the closing of the banking convention, gave the national bank a ‘pull on the wrist’, which has allowed the drop by drop to become entrenched in the national economy.

“Worlds touched by the drop drop that has been financed with 20 percent daily interest rates,” said the president, who recalled that the mafias launder their resources with this disastrous system.

That is why he called on the bankers to irrigate resources to the countryside.

“What makes drop by drop appear is the inability of the financial sector to reach the field,” he said, recalling that half of the Colombian economy is popular economy.

“We need the financing to reach the peasant. If the peasant economy remains in the raw product, and no elaborated products are generated, wealth will not be generated,” Petro said before the auditorium of the Cartagena Convention Center.

Before the country’s bankers, the President of the Republic called for financing field production and “decarbonizing economies.”

The president pointed out that the time has come for the world to “democratize production and finance the decarbonization of the economy.” And he was emphatic in inviting banks to stop financing carbon activities.

“It is difficult because, for example, the financial sector in Colombia, we see that in the last decade it reached the liquidity to earn large profits from royalties and titles on the oil economy. And then, how do you separate from the carbonic world to the decarbonized world? ”, He argued.

“We must ensure that the state leads the financial world towards sustainable objectives”, he concluded.

Earlier, José Antonio Ocampo, Minister of Finance, spoke at the event about the tax reform and explained that Some of the provisions that were delivered regarding the proposal are being reviewed.

One of them is to review the list of ultra-processed foods on which what this government has called a ‘health tax’ is going to be imposed. “We may rationalize it a bit, but both taxes, sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods, are going to be discussed in Congress. There are already many public health sectors that ask us to maintain the initiatives,” said the minister.

Ocampo added that “there is much less opposition to sugary taxes than to ultra-processed ones. The proposal that we are going to deliver to the speakers is precisely to rationalize the list of foods.”

BRIEFCASE
*John Montaño, Correspondent for EL TIEMPO