The Baker Plan (formally, Peace Plan for Self-Determination of the People of

Western Sahara) is a United Nations initiative to grant self-determination to

Western Sahara. It was intended to replace the Settlement Plan of 1991, which was
further detailed in the Houston Agreement of 1997.

Baker I & II
The first draft of the plan, called Baker I or the Framework Agreement, was circulated by the
UN special envoy James Baker in 2000, but never presented formally to the Security Council.
Although based on Baker's proposals, it was drafted by a Morocco-sponsored legal team [1] . It
offered the people of Western Sahara autonomy within the Moroccan state. Except for defense
and foreign policy, all other decisions would be the responsibility of local government. Morocco
accepted the plan, but Algeria and the Polisario front rejected it. Algeria countered by proposing
that the territory be divided between the parties. The second version (informally known as Baker
II) envisioned Saharan self-rule under a Western Sahara Authority for a period of five years,
with a referendum on independence to follow.

Brady Plan

In August, 1982, the Less Developed Countries (LDC) debt situation became a crisis when Mexico suspended current payments to
its creditors. The crisis simmered for the next seven years as slow growth, inflation and capital flight plagued debtor nations.
Private lenders were reluctant to provide new money, but at the same time lending by official, taxpayer-supported institutions
increased.

In March 1989, the United States Treasury Department under then Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, formulated a new
strategy for dealing with developing country debt. The strategy, known as the "Brady Plan" and drawing on Secretary Brady's
career on Wall Street, recognized that reversing the exodus of capital from debtor nations was critical, and that global capital
markets would direct resources to any country that had the will to implement genuine reforms based upon sound economic
fundamentals and articulated in a manner clearly understood by investors.

Accordingly, the Brady Plan focused on debt and debt service reduction by commercial bank creditors for those debtors who agreed
to implement substantial economic reform programs. The Plan offered banks credit enhancements in exchange for their agreement
to reduce claims. These credit enhancements were created by first converting commercial bank loans into bonds, and then
collateralizing principal and rolling interest payments on those bonds with US Treasury zeroes purchased with the proceeds of IMF
and World Bank loans.

A Brady Plan for America

What is creating the financial panic that is unfolding as I write, what is causing the shares of all
financial institutions to collapse, is the simple fact that Wall Street does not know the extent of
the damage to the quality of the mortgages that financial institutions own. As Morgan Stanley
and Goldman Sachs follow Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers on a path to
extinction that will cost the US economy dearly, isn´t it time that the US government really
intervenes? What the US government has to do is a Brady Plan on itself. What worked for Latin
America in the 80s can work now for America itself. It simply entails guaranteeing the majority
of the principal and interest from those mortgages. And what was fantastic about the Brady plan
is that the guarantee cost nothing to the US Treasury then. And, in my view, the same would be
true now. Most of the mortgages in the States will be repaid over the next decades.