The Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres, denounced this Friday that the current global financial system is “immoral” and insisted on the need to reform it in depth so that it stops penalizing the poorest.
Guterres, who has been strongly defending this idea since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, stressed that the issue must be one of the world’s top priorities for 2022.
For the former socialist prime minister of Portugal, the world financial system has failed in the current crisis and, precisely because of its deficiencies, it is leading to a very uneven recovery.
“Let’s make it clear: the global financial system is immoral. It favors the rich and punishes the poor,” said Guterres, who recalled that while the most powerful economies are recovering from recession, low-income countries are experiencing “their slowest growth in a generation.
As he stressed, the growing divergences between rich and poor nations will lead to more instability, crises and forced migration.
“These imbalances are not a fault, but a characteristic of the global financial system,” he insisted to defend the need for changes.
Among other things, Guterres was highly critical of the key role assigned to credit rating agencies, which routinely give poor countries poor marks and thus leave them without access to private finance.
In addition, he defended that reforming the global financial architecture requires an adequate framework for public debt relief and restructuring, a fairer tax system -which distributes part of the trillions of dollars accumulated by the richest during the pandemic- or measures against the illicit financial flows.
“In 2022 I am going to continue pressing for these fundamental reforms,” Guterres advanced, before the representatives of the UN member states.
