李月芬：我曾告诫一些非洲国家，大量借款时要小心(11)

About the same time, international financial institutions encouraged developing countries to tap into the international capital market. The credit rating agencies also started to give higher sovereign ratings to developing countries, and financial institutions started to take on more risks, to lend to countries, even to those without a credit rating.
With the great push and pull for tapping into the private capitals, some of the frontier economies, for instance, African countries, they"ve started to float sovereign bonds, starting to borrow heavily at the international capital market. At that time I was working in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. I had meetings with some of the ministers of finance of African countries. I said, you need to be careful when you borrow so heavily, you need to think about whether or not you would have the capacity to service this debt. But that was the time when the Bretton Woods institutions encouraged these countries to develop their financial market and also go international. It"s difficult to resist the trend, many countries started to borrow heavily.