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Saranda Police stopped two married couples as they were taking children across the border using forged permits P. 2

In focus: Citizens’ savings The poor people are having a Hamlet-like monologue: Should we keep our money in the bank or not?! In focus: Citizens’ savings Is Keynes’s formula correct: Saving = Investment? The poor people are having a Hamlet-like monologue: Should we keep our money in the bank or not?! By Mitro Çela ... Scenarios filmed in the shadow of the IMF Saving is at once logical for the opposition and a fantasy for the government. So one’s thoughts go further: The banking system is “growing” under the care of the IMF. Why did the “FeMiNists” remain indifferent to these as-onomic banking interests? Why was its stance repeated with the pyramid schemes? Excluding any possibility of deliberate sabotage, I think the IMF office had become a “checkpoint” ... [?] kept only the information in check. One of the scenarios leading to lower inflation is to reduce the money in citizens’ pockets and put it into banks. Any means aimed at this goal is justified. Thus, IMF officials stayed in the shadows while the pyramid firms flourished, because citizens’ savings from the pyramid schemes ended up in Banka Kombëtare Tregtare. Thus the tactic of concentrating citizens’ savings was tolerated even when Banka Kombëtare Tregtare, which was being sold as part of the privatization process according to IMF schemes, raised interest rates to pyramid-scheme levels. Let us be clear: the opposition favors this view, but the government opposes it! What about the independents? They stand aside. Bank experts’ practices and John Keynes’s ideas A week ago we saw a spectacle about banks on TVSH. The opposition threw, the government caught. According to bank experts, the Albanian banking system is flourishing. The IMF and the World Bank have also contributed to this growth. This was said on the program by one of the Bank’s experts ... [?] on the same [?] page 9

Kukës, Shkodër, Dibër are the areas leading the poverty map Rezi Nika “Determining the subsistence minimum requires a study based on the development of numerous social indicators. All of these must be accompanied by heavy financial costs. In today’s world, the problem of establishing the subsistence minimum is very complex and difficult.” This is the official position of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs on why Albanians still do not know the amount of money they need to have per day in order to live normally. Until the government takes responsibility for finding the subsistence minimum for its citizens, Albanians will still have to survive. How? By submitting themselves to full-time undeclared work, inventing all kinds of ways and means to “feed themselves while completing the dream ‘of a better life’” [?] ... on speedboats to Italy, anywhere, just not life in Albania. Individual and institutional initiatives have been undertaken to determine the so-called subsistence minimum, but this is not an official subsistence minimum. The government is working on it, because such a study is a state-level undertaking. Cooperation is needed with the Ministry of Finance, INSTAT, Social Security, NGOs...” P. 11 Employment

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