This post also appeared on the Huffington Post. A Bretton Woods project statement issued on April 6 was prescient indeed:
The MD must be, and must be seen to be wholly independent of any national or regional interest. This is particularly important when the home state is a powerful member of the IMF. In practical terms therefore, recent or sitting ministers should be ruled out.Who’s that? The candidate now supported by France and the UK: Christine Lagarde is, of course, a sitting minister of a powerful member country.
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Well at least she is a woman – widely discussed now as a good idea for the male-dominated IMF (compared to the World Bank and in culture as well as numbers) -- and is said to be independent-minded. But would she be able to eschew “representing” France or the powerful France/Germany/UK triad in the tense discussions that seem to pit Greece (and other peripheral countries of the euro zone) against the banks in Germany? Would she not seem to be biased even if she wasn’t – beholden to Sarkozy and Merkel generating immoral hazard for the IMF (or the euro or Greece. . . )? Won’t she represent, whether she wants to or not, the stench of colonialism wafting around the IMF?
The Bretton Woods project statement also emphasizes the logic of locking in a process including:
- a short and open list of candidates made public
- no need for a candidate to have his/her own country’s support (Arminio Fraga headed the Brazilian Central Bank under the party now out of power; that is also Gordon Brown’s problem of course)
- an open voting process based on formal voting (as proposed by the Indian ED Arvind Virmani – go here
- the need for any candidate to have a majority of country members not just a majority of weighted votes (the "double majority" idea).
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