EUROPE has shown tremendous alacrity in circling the wagons around its preferred candidate, Christine Lagarde, and may swiftly create a fait accompli by bringing other advanced economies on board. For all their promises to make the selection process more transparent and merit-based, the Europeans are in effect saying that emerging markets’ time will come – just not yet.
EUROPE has shown tremendous alacrity in circling the wagons around its preferred candidate, Christine Lagarde, and may swiftly create a fait accompli by bringing other advanced economies on board. For all their promises to make the selection process more transparent and merit-based, the Europeans are in effect saying that emerging markets’ time will come – just not yet.
EUROPE has shown tremendous alacrity in circling the wagons around its preferred candidate, Christine Lagarde, and may swiftly create a fait accompli by bringing other advanced economies on board. For all their promises to make the selection process more transparent and merit-based, the Europeans are in effect saying that emerging markets’ time will come – just not yet.
EUROPE has shown tremendous alacrity in circling the wagons around its preferred candidate, Christine Lagarde, and may swiftly create a fait accompli by bringing other advanced economies on board. For all their promises to make the selection process more transparent and merit-based, the Europeans are in effect saying that emerging markets’ time will come – just not yet.
AS OF THE time of this writing, it appears that the succession battle is all but over, and that Christine Lagarde is the candidate with near unstoppable momentum. So rather than speculate on who is the best candidate, or even the most probable, it is more instructive to parse what we have seen take place over the last few days, and reflect on its implications.
IT SHOULD definitely not be a West European. There is no doubt about Madame Lagarde's competence, but too many political figures have taken the post in the recent past, and the shifting geography of the world's economy requires a more representative figure.
MY ANSWER is: not a politician. The last two directors were politicians who were holding the job while in the opposition party of their own country, and who were supposed to resume their political careers after their mandate at the IMF.
TO ME one of the best and most obvious candidates to be the next IMF head seems to be missing from the Economist's list of candidates. As governor of the Brazilian central bank during and after the 1999 crisis, Arminio Fraga accomplished what many people predicted was impossible.
IT IS EASIER to start with who the new boss should not be. The IMF is heavily involved in the Greek negotiations. It will become even more involved in the euro area if and when Ireland, Portugal and maybe Spain or Italy present similarly urgent problems.
There is a long-standing tension between competition and stability in banking. In the UK, the IBC report promotes “challenger” banks to prise open a cosy banking oligopoly. But it was precisely those “challenger” banks like Northern Rock, HBOS, and Anglo Irish that introduced ‘dodgy products” and took most risks to build market share.
Featured guest
Eswar Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in International Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was previously chief of the Financial Studies Division in the International Monetary Fund’s Research Department and, before that, was the head of the IMF’s China Division.
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