There’s a breathtaking arrogance in demands by European leaders to choose the next IMF head on grounds that the euro crisis dominates the IMF agenda.
The role of the IMF is to support governments in short term financial difficulty, not to patch up a flawed experiment in monetary union. What really galls is that it’s only a year since the Europeans were hell-bent on excluding the IMF from the Greek bail-out for reasons of pride.
Imagine you’re the finance minister for Zambia or Malawi and you read what Angela Merkel told the Financial Times yesterday: “naturally the developing countries have claim on the highest position of the IMF but the current situation speaks for a European candidate given the considerable problems of the euro.”
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this post was first published by OneWorld UK