Ajay Banga

One is the length and duration of the disruption, and the second is...

Right now, while there is some kind of a ceasefire, you can make a guess of what kind of damage has happened to facilities.

If the conflict were to restart, then what kind of damage continues to happen to energy production facilities is unclear.

Those two dimensions are what we're using.

We've got a scenario that says that if it comes to a ceasefire now and three to four months of normalization, we have some impact on growth, some impact on inflation, both on the wrong side.

Right.

But if it comes back into a conflict and continues after that, and this becomes a six- to eight-month impact before it normalizes, not the conflict, but the downstream effects, then that's a very different impact on growth and inflation.

So that's how we're working it.

Well, I would say if you were to, in the emerging markets, which is where my focus is, if you were to focus right now, you should be more concerned about inflation because that's the immediate impact you're feeling of the disruption in all these supplies, whether it's oil or gas or sulfur or helium or fertilizer or downstream chemicals.

But when you go out further, and if you're managing to get that inflation under control, then the next big thing to do would be to worry about your growth again.

But they're both important.

I'd just prioritize inflation before I went chasing down the growth path.

Absolutely.

So both the IMF and us and other institutions like ours are working through in what ways can we be helpful to these institutions, to these countries as they respond.

So in our case, we have something called a crisis response toolkit, which was launched a couple of years ago.

What that does is 10% of the undisbursed balances of approved projects in a country, any project, can be diverted for purposes of crisis management under the control of that country's finance ministry.

So if you put all that together, you add in a few other projects where they could do this and other work we're doing across our emerging markets, $20 to $25 billion of liquidity could be made available very quickly to our clients.

if this continues into that other scenario longer term, then we're trying to see if we can get to another somewhere between 50 and 60 billion of capacity to help.

Having said that, I want to make sure you understand one thing, which is, you know, what we do right now has to be done in a way in countries that it's kind of targeted carefully and it's clearly temporary and transparent because none of these countries are the headroom to, let's say, do a permanent fuel subsidy.

Much better than that