KINGSTON, Jamaica – AFTER the recent excitement generated by last week's Chicago Tribune editorial, describing Jamaica as the “Greece of the Western Hemisphere”, it is extremely well timed that yesterday marked the start of the two-day “Second Annual Meeting of Governors of the Caribbean Country Department” of the Inter- American Development Bank (IDB).
The IDB, represented by its President, Colombian national Luis Moreno, and here at the invitation of the Jamaican government, is Jamaica's largest multilateral creditor and, with a loan portfolio of just under US$1.3 billion, is probably the Jamaican government's largest individual lender on a net basis, as even the lending of our large Jamaican banks would be mainly funded by locally-based deposits.
