In an interview with The Daily Caller, Luis Alberto Moreno, the President of the Inter-American Development Bank, described the lessons Latin America learned during its debt crisis and said the U.S. has to do “something” about its current debt situation.
“The big lesson in Latin America was that we were able to work ourselves out of the crisis largely by doing structural reforms … the kinds of reforms that allowed growth to take place at the time was, you know, the large amount of state-owned assets that needed to be privatized to generate sources of income for the countries,” he said Tuesday after a ceremony honoring the former IADP president Enrique Iglesias.
When asked about Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s prediction that the U.S. will face a financial meltdown in 2-5 years, Moreno said that, without reforms, such a scenario is “certainly” in the cards.
“Well, certainly, if you don’t do anything. I mean, I think that at least Americans, I hope, are able to put their minds together and hopefully at the beginning of next year when a lot of things come together, the sequestration, the debt limit, the tax cuts, you know, you’re going to need to do something,” he said.
“I think the world is waiting for your electoral process to finish and then concentrate on beginning to put a major solution to some of your fiscal issues,” Moreno, the former Colombian ambassador to the United States, added.
America’s $15.6 trillion debt is now equal to the size of the country’s entire economy.