22 U.S.C. § 262o–2 — Advocacy of policies to enhance general effectiveness of International Monetary Fund

(a) In general The Secretary of the Treasury must instruct the U.S. Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund to aggressively use America's voice and vote to: (1) Strongly promote IMF policies that make its programs and assistance more effective at encouraging exchange-rate stability and avoiding competitive currency devaluations that would further destabilize world finance and trade. (2) Strongly promote IMF effectiveness in encouraging market-oriented reform, trade liberalization, economic growth, democratic governance, and social stability, by: setting up an independent monetary authority that fully controls monetary policy and maintains a non-inflationary, freely convertible currency; opening domestic markets to fair competition by ending unfair favoritism for small or large businesses, breaking up elite monopolies, creating real anti-trust laws, and setting up fair dispute-resolution procedures; privatizing industry fairly, spreading economic opportunity broadly, ending government and elite monopolies, closing loss-making enterprises, and reducing government control over production; deregulating the economy by removing overly burdensome rules and strengthening legal protection for contracts and intellectual property; building or strengthening a social safety net to cushion workers from unemployment and dislocation; and encouraging countries to open agricultural markets by reducing trade barriers. (3) Strongly promote IMF effectiveness — working with other international authorities and international financial institutions (as defined in section 262r(c)(2) of this title) — in strengthening developing countries' financial systems and encouraging sound banking practices, including laws ensuring banks meet strong standards for capital reserves, oversight, and transparency. (4) Strongly promote IMF effectiveness — working with other international authorities and institutions — in helping developing countries build internationally acceptable bankruptcy laws, including through technical assistance. (5) Strongly promote policies for fair burden-sharing by the private sector, so investors and creditors bear more of the consequences of their own decisions, including: stronger crisis prevention and early-warning monitoring of countries' economic policies and capital flows, with fuller disclosure to markets; faster work on strengthening emerging-market financial systems to cut crisis risk; considering debt-contract terms that encourage dialogue between a sovereign debtor and its private creditors; considering extending IMF lending-to-arrears policy to foster that dialogue; considering mechanisms for orderly workouts for countries in debt or liquidity crises; considering links between official crisis financing and private market participants' willingness to join stabilization efforts; using the IMF to facilitate debtor-creditor discussions so financial troubles get resolved without improperly relying on public money; and having the IMF pair crisis funding for countries hurt by reckless borrowing with efforts to get meaningful contributions from the private creditors, investors, and banks that extended the risky credit. (6) Strongly promote policies — working with other international authorities and institutions — that make the IMF more effective at encouraging good governance in recipient countries, by fostering structural reforms, including procurement reform, that reduce chances for corruption, bribery, and drug-related money laundering. (7) Strongly promote designing IMF programs so that governments drawing on IMF funds shift public money away from unproductive purposes — including large "show case" projects and excessive military spending — and toward investing in people, physical infrastructure, and social programs that protect the neediest and promote fairness. (8) Work with the IMF to design economic policies that fit each recipient country's specific circumstances, recognizing that a poorly fitted stabilization program can further destabilize the economy and cause needless economic, social, and political harm. (9) Structure IMF programs so that maintaining and improving core labor standards is a routine, integral goal of policy discussions with recipient countries — so that recipient governments commit to letting workers exercise internationally recognized rights, including free association and collective bargaining through unions of their choice; measures meant to make labor markets more flexible stay consistent with those rights; and IMF staff survey recipient countries' labor policies and recommend ways to maintain or improve core labor standards. (10) Strongly promote structuring IMF programs, as much as possible, to discourage practices that might fuel ethnic or social conflict in a recipient country. (11) Strongly promote IMF recognition that macroeconomic policy and environmental conditions affect each other, and urge the IMF to encourage member countries to pursue macroeconomic stability while also protecting the environment. (12) Push for greater IMF transparency, including making the IMF and its staff more accessible, releasing more working papers, past evaluations, and other documents, publishing Letters of Intent and Policy Framework Papers, and adopting a more open policy on Article IV consultation reports. (13) Push for greater IMF accountability and self-evaluation, by strongly promoting review of the Office of Internal Audit and Inspection and the Executive Board's external evaluation pilot program, and, if needed, creating an operations evaluation department modeled on the World Bank's, guided by usefulness, credibility, transparency, and independence. (14) Strongly promote coordination with the World Bank and other international financial institutions (as defined in section 262r(c)(2) of this title) on structural reforms that make it easier for small businesses — including microenterprises — to get credit, especially in the world's poorest, most heavily indebted countries. (15) Work with the IMF to: build strong global anti-money-laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist-financing (CFT) systems; make sure countries' compliance with Financial Action Task Force AML and CFT standards is closely and fully monitored; make sure AML and CFT issues are addressed in Article IV reports, IMF programs, and other regular country reviews; treat effective AML and CFT systems as essential to a sound financial system; and stress how important sound AML and CFT systems are to global growth and development. (b) Coordination with other executive departments Where it would help achieve the goals in subsection (a), the Secretary of the Treasury must pursue them together with the Secretaries of State, Labor, and Commerce, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, the head of the Agency for International Development, and the U.S. Trade Representative.