Word: imf
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...financial assistance. When its role dwindled to near-irrelevance earlier this decade as the world economy expanded strongly, few tears were shed. Taking over as managing director in 2007, Frenchman Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned its directors that, "what might be at stake today is the very existence of the IMF...
...suddenly the IMF is the center of attention again, and this time in a new and unaccustomed role: as the hero of the hour, the institution seen as best able to rescue the collapsing world economy. A principal outcome of the April 2 meeting of G-20 leaders in London was an agreement to triple the IMF's resources to $750 billion, and to allow it to issue a further $250 billion on its own. Part of that money is supposed to go to countries suddenly in financial straits, and part is designed to serve as a more general liquidity...
...extra money is just part of the story. Along with the new resources come, at least in theory, important changes in the way the IMF functions. In the future, European countries will no longer have an automatic right to pick its managing director, as they do at present. And through a reform of its arcane shareholding or "quota" system, the domination of policy by the U.S. and other developed economies will give way to a more balanced system of governance, under which developing countries such as Brazil, China and Russia will have a greater say. The IMF's focus...
...seen whether all these intentions become reality. But it's a sign of the times that one of the signatories of the G-20 communiqué was Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Her husband Nestor Kirchner, whom she succeeded as President, has long been one of the IMF's most vocal critics; he blamed it for causing a national economic "catastrophe" and spurned its help when he started rebuilding Argentina's shattered economy in 2003. It probably helped that shortly before the G-20 announcement, the IMF gave the world a peek at its new, softer and more...
Change is long overdue. "Who can possibly justify the fact that Belgium has a substantially larger quota than India, Brazil or Mexico?" asks Ariel Buira, of the Mexican Council for International Affairs. The IMF's legions of critics even include other international agencies. Malcolm Knight, a former general manager of the Bank for International Settlements - a sort of club for central bankers - recently blasted the IMF in an article that described its performance as "less than evenhanded or effective," and accused it of being asleep at the wheel in the months before the current economic turmoil. "The IMF was uncharacteristically...