Senior fellow Arvind Subramanian in a Business Standard article on the IMF and Keynes.
From the Article
Let us suppose that it were John Maynard Keynes rather than Angela Merkel, Timothy Geithner and their ilk deciding on Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s successor to head the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Who would the Great Man have chosen? Though an exercise in fantasy, this is actually a question that Keynes addressed seriously if not directly.
At the first annual meeting of the IMF in Savannah, Georgia, in 1946 Professor Keynes made a memorable speech outlining the three desirables and one undesirable for the Bretton Woods twins, the IMF and the the World Bank (in an interesting choice of genders, Professor Keynes dubbed them “Master Fund” and “Miss Bank”).
Drawing an analogy with the christening party for Princess Aurora in the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty”, he said the good fairy would confer three gifts on the twins. First, a many-coloured coat “as a perpetual reminder that they belong to the whole world”. Second, a box of vitamins to encourage “energy and fearless spirit, which does not shelve and avoid difficult issues, but welcomes them and is determined to solve them”.
Third, “a spirit of wisdom … so that their approach to every problem is absolutely objective”.
Professor Keynes’ dread was the politicisation of the Fund (and the Bank), which he expressed as the curse of the malicious (uninvited) fairy that “you two brats shall grow up politicians; your every thought and act shall have an arrière pensée; everything you determine shall not be for its own sake or on its own merits but because of something else”. And if this were to happen, he said it would be appropriate for these institutions “to fall into an eternal slumber, never to waken or be heard of again in the courts and markets of Mankind”. His aversion to politicisation was also reflected in his plea – overruled, like many others, by the United States – to locate the Fund and the Bank in New York rather than in Washington DC.