General Arrangements to Borrow

The GAB, established in 1962 and amended several times, is an agreement
under which the International Monetary Fund may borrow monies from major
industrial nations (Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the
Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden, and
Switzerland). The GAB were originally designed to enable the participants
to strengthen the Fund by lending to it specified amounts of their
currencies. These loans would be made when supplementary resources were
needed to help finance purchases by GAB participants in circumstances where
such financing would forestall or cope with an impairment of the
international monetary system. The GAB were amended to include an
associated agreement with Saudi Arabia and to permit the Fund to use the
arrangements to finance transactions with nonparticipants under certain
conditions on purchases involving upper credit tranche conditionality