November 14, 2007 (LPAC)--Speaking Nov. 10 in Santiago, Chile, Ecuador's President Rafael Correa denounced as a form of "pimping," the practice that most central banks have of depositing a nation's foreign reserves abroad. Currently, $450 billion of Ibero-America's reserves are deposited outside the region, "supposedly for security reasons," he said. In fact, "we are financing the United States!"

In the case of Ecuador, he said, "this is a case of Ripley's 'Believe it or Not!'" The "autonomous" Central Bank has deposited our reserves, which are largely public-sector deposits, in Miami! "Those national savings should instead be invested in our refineries and dams, but instead, those brilliant Central Bank technocrats have invested them abroad, and we can't touch them, because [the bank] is autonomous, by law." Correa warned that once the Constituent Assembly goes into session, "all this will change." The Central Bank, he vowed, will "once again serve the interests of the Ecuadorian people."

The Ecuadorian leader laughingly noted that by saying this, he would almost certainly be accused of being a "Chavista" -- a follower of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez--because the latter has also proposed doing away with Central Bank autonomy. But, he added, "the person who convinced President Chavez to put an end to that pimping was none other than your humble servant.... The only thing that kind of pimping is good for is implementing a monetarist system, with no democratic oversight."

President Correa offered equally polemical remarks Nov. 10 from Santiago, Chile, where he was attending the Ibero-American heads-of-state summit. In a speech to the Third Ibero-American Civic and Business Conference, which took place on the sidelines of the summit, he scathingly denounced the predatory looting practices that free-market ideologues, posing as "businessmen," applied in Ecuador and in Ibero-America in the 1990s, leaving destruction in their wake. Now, he said, "it's time for the real businessmen... those who bet on the nation and its future, to throw the modern-day money-changers out of Latin America's temples."