Candidate assessment: Marchenko is not of sufficient caliber to lead the IMF by Meruert Makhmutova

June 9, 2011 by Leave a comment

imfboss has invited candidate assessments from civil society voices in the home countries of the candidates to head the IMF. Throughout the process we will be posting these here for your benefit.

By Meruert Makhmutova, Director of Public Policy Research Center, Almaty, Kazakhstan

The Governor of the Central Bank of Kazakhstan was nominated by Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister to head the International Monetary Fund at CIS Government heads meeting in Minsk. As a result Marchenko was endorsed as the single candidate from the CIS countries.

The chances of Marchenko becoming the head of IMF are around 1 per cent given the global political realities. There would be no real chance at all if the selection process was actually merit based. The above mentioned 1 per cent would only be possible if Kazakhstan negotiated intensively with other developing countries and they are able to join forces in pushing on the United States and European countries. But it seems the process for the selection of the IMF head differs from the lobbying that goes on for the chairmanship of the OSCE.

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Candidate assessment: Christine Lagarde blindly defends financial interests by Thomas Coutrout

June 3, 2011 by 2 Comments

imfboss has invited candidate assessments from civil society voices in the home countries of the candidates to head the IMF. Throughout the process we will be posting these here for your benefit.

La version français de cet article est la suivante.

By Thomas Coutrout, co-president ATTAC France, Paris, France

Christine Lagarde was a minister without any capacity for initiative or innovation. She strictly applied the instructions coming from the French President, especially during the 2008 financial crisis and the European debt crisis of 2010-2011.

Similarly, in the case of the rising scandal Credit Lyonnais vs. Tapie, she executed the orders of the French Presidency. It is widely suspected that the presidential office wanted to reward the support of Bernard Tapie, a friend of President Nicolas Sarkozy, by using a private arbitration tribunal instead of the ordinary court that was about to reject Tapie’s enormous financial claims. Tapie ended up receiving an unexpected €210 millions premium from the French Treasury.

At her 25 May press conference when she announced her candidacy for the IMF, a German journalist asked Lagarde in what occasions she had proven personal leadership since she was minister of Nicolas Sarkozy’s government. After some stuttering she could only cite the law for the protection of bank customers – yet this law has been criticized as seriously inadequate by consumer associations.

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Candidate assessment: Chicago boy Agustín Carstens can’t understand the financial crisis by Noemi Levy

June 2, 2011 by 5 Comments

imfboss has invited candidate assessments from civil society voices in the home countries of the candidates to head the IMF. Throughout the process we will be posting these here for your benefit.

La versión en español de este artículo está disponible abajo.

By Professor Noemi Levy, Faculty of Economics, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico

The academic and professional life of Agustín Carstens, is linked with the theoretical current of monetarism, led by Milton Friedman, and his successors Thomas Sargent and Robert Lucas, the initiators of the ‘rational expectations’ school.  Carstens started his studies at a private Mexican university (ITAM, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Monterrey), and continued on to do his masters and doctoral work at the University of Chicago. In Mexico, he is known as a ‘Chicago Boy’. His working life has been linked with the central bank, the ministry of finance and the IMF.

As a result, Carstens has never been exposed to alternative economic theories, and during the most critical moments in contemporary Mexican history (crises in 1994 and 2008) he has been a central bank bureaucrat. All of his publications concern exchange rate issues; he is a strong advocate of price stability (see selected publications below and his speeches as governor of the Bank of Mexico). Dr. Carstens has little imagination or creativity.

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Candidate assessment: Lagarde choice would signal a return to textbook monetarist policies by Philippe Marlière

June 2, 2011 by Leave a comment

imfboss has invited candidate assessments from civil society voices in the home countries of the candidates to head the IMF. Throughout the process we will be posting these here for your benefit. The below was first published in the Guardian.

By Philippe Marlière
First published on guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 May 2011

In France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn epitomised to the point of self-parody the “gauche caviar” (champagne socialism): the Marrakech riad, the libertine lifestyle and a very, very wealthy wife. If Christine Lagarde succeeds him as director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), there will no doubt be a radical change of style within the institution. To start with, the media will no longer have to cover extra-marital affairs with subordinates or worse. Strauss-Kahn’s flamboyant leadership will be replaced with a more down-to-earth one.

Lagarde has the discreet charm of the French bourgeoisie. Her uptight and sometimes demure manners will offer a stark contrast with Strauss-Kahn’s bling and brash personality. The French finance minister should be a great hit in Washington: she speaks an American-accented English, studied in the US and worked as congressional assistant. The financial media have adored her for a while: in 2009, the Financial Times ranked her the best finance minister of the eurozone, and Forbes magazine named her the 17th most powerful woman in the world. But if her record as finance minister is anything to go by, she should definitely not be given the job.

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Candidate assessment: Is Manuel the man to manage the IMF by Patrick Bond

May 24, 2011 by 3 Comments

imfboss has invited candidate assessments from civil society voices in the home countries of the candidates to head the IMF. Throughout the process we will be posting these here for your benefit.

By Patrick Bond, University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, South Africa

The world’s most predatory financial institution had until last Thursday a managing director nicknamed “The Seducer,” who talked left, evoking John Maynard Keynes, and walked right, imposing austerity on the Third World, including now Ireland, Greece and Portugal.

Useful though that was to world financial elites, Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s notorious misogyny allowed the powers behind the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to ditch him with little hesitation once rape charges by a vulnerable hotel cleaner last Saturday began to stick. Raising the prospect of a consensual-sex defense worthy of Jacob Zuma, superstar lawyer Benjamin Brafman stupidly remarked, “The forensic evidence, we believe, are not consistent with forcible encounter.”

South Africa’s Trevor Manuel is apparently being seriously considered as Strauss-Kahn’s replacement, in competition with conservative French finance minister Christine Lagarde, British political failure Gordon Brown and other emerging-markets personalities. (A “Europeans Only” sign always graced the IMF director’s door, but surely that can change?)

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Candidate assessment: Peer Steinbrück would be an acceptable centre-left candidate for European elites by Peter Wahl

May 23, 2011 by Leave a comment

imfboss has invited candidate assessments from civil society voices in the home countries of the candidates to head the IMF. Throughout the process we will be posting these here for your benefit.

By Peter Wahl, World Economy Ecology and Development (WEED), Berlin, Germany

Peer Steinbrück was minister of finance under Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2005 until 2009 in the coalition of the Christian Democratic Party and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He has studied economics and sociology and made a typical party career in the SPD working as an assistant of several social democratic ministers, for instance in the ministries for construction, for environment and for technology. In 2005 he was running as candidate for the presidency in the federal state of North-Rhine Westphalia, which by population is the biggest state in the German federation. But he was beaten with the worst result for his party since the end of the war.

Steinbrück belongs to the right wing of the SPD and represents a kind of “New Labour” policies. In the first years as finance minister he strongly supported further deregulation and liberalization of financial markets with the argument, that German competitiveness on global financial markets would have to be strengthened. However, before the Heiligendamm G8, he tried to advocate more transparency for hedge funds, but did not succeed and gave up, accepting the arguments of the UK and the US.

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Candidate assessment: Axel Weber lacks diplomatic skills and strategic thinking by Peter Wahl

May 23, 2011 by 1 Comment

imfboss has invited candidate assessments from civil society voices in the home countries of the candidates to head the IMF. Throughout the process we will be posting these here for your benefit.

By Peter Wahl, World Economy Ecology and Development (WEED), Berlin, Germany

Axel Weber was head of the German Central Bank, the Bundesbank, from 2004 until April 2011. He had been appointed by the Schröder government, which consisted at that time of the Social-Democratic Party and the Green Party. Before his assignment he was part of the so called “Five wise men” an influential advisory board of five German top economic institutes to the federal government.

Weber, a university professor of economics, represents the hard core monetarist school and the tradition of the Bundesbank from the times of the Deutschmark. This paradigm of the Bundesbank has been imposed to the euro-zone and the anchored in the statutes of the European Central Bank (ECB).

It was therefore no surprise, that Weber did not understand the system in which he was playing quite an important role. When the first German bank, the IKB, was collapsing in August 2007 as a result of the rising tide of the US-subprime crisis, he declared that “the exposure of German Banks in the American real estate market is limited. It is concentrated on investments with a high rating. Any comparison, made by some media reports, between the present economic situation and the banking crisis of 1931 are completely erroneous.”

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